about usage scenarios

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Beware... Noob alert!

[Sorry about the `windbaggedness' factor, but having a little trouble
expressing my concerns]

I'm hoping to start using tarsnap soon and have a plan in my head of
how I might go about it.

I'd like for some experienced users to comment please.

I run 6-7 home machines several windows, a couple linux and one
solaris. 

I hoped to setup one virtual machine linux guest on  win7 host that
would do all the tarsnap work.

All my machines are accessible by ssh and rsync.  I hoped to run the
tarsnap backups by way of this one vm guest (running debian).

For example:

One of the windows XP machines houses my photo collection.  It runs to
about 35-37GB.  Not really compressible by much since many image
formats are already fairly  compresses.

I'm not sure how this would be done in tarsnap.  But the idea would be
to go at it like I might with rsync.  That is from the machine
running tarsnap:
  (again not sure of tarsnap commands yet so using rsync as example)

I'd setup an sshfs (fuse) filesystem for each machine I want to backup
stuff from on. That would be done  on the vm running tarsnap.

You all may already be familiar sshfs, but if not it works
something like nfs so that the remote filesytem appears to be part of
the local filesystem. So there would be a directory appearing on my
local fs that would contain the photo collection.

So with rsync it would look like:

rsync -avvz my/local/sshfs_mnt/dir/ some@remote:/my/images/

Maybe someone can fill in the appropriate tarsnap cmd?

But really what I'm asking is if a plan like this is what people might
do with tarsnap?

-------        ---------       ---=---       ---------      -------- 
In summary: I'd setup a sshfs mnts on the host running tarsnap, for
each machine where I had something to backup. Then mount all the
necessary machines and run thru them using tarsnap to put the stuff on
whatever tarsnap puts them on.
-------        ---------       ---=---       ---------      -------- 

I guess the resulting backups work something like rsnapshot? If so
then is finding copies of stuff somewhat involved like it is with
rsnapshot?