Better tarsnap usage pattern than I have?

[Jeff Rizzo <riz@tastylime.net>]

I've been using tarsnap for about a year, and I'm pretty happy with it 
overall.  I've been noticing my storage usage (particularly on a couple 
of systems) creeping up, so I took the time over a couple days (and it 
did take that long on the higher-usage system) to nuke most of the daily 
backups I'd been storing, in favor of one per month except for the most 
recent 30 days.

I did manage to get my storage totals down a bit (29GB->27GB on one 
system, 28->25GB on another), but in doing so, I racked up bandwidth 
charges which would have paid for the storage charges I saved for more 
than 60 days, and was also about 8x the total daily storage charge.

So, I'm wondering if I'm doing it wrong.  :)

Basically, I have a script on each system I'm backing up that runs 
tarsnap once a day on /, and I flag scratch partitions (etc) with 
'nodump', so they don't get backed up.  What I'm wondering is if there's 
an easier/cheaper way to remove specific data from my daily storage 
totals that I later decide doesn't need backup without having to delete 
all archives between when that data was first backed up and when I 
deleted it from the master... I don't see an easy answer, but perhaps 
I'm missing something.

The other thing I wonder is if there's a less bandwidth-intensive way of 
deleting stuff.  I mean, it makes sense that bandwidth is used during 
deletes, but I was a little surprised at how *much*...

Thanks for any input!

+j