On a related note, I am just working on setting up tarsnap via Puppet and it would be really useful if tarsnap supported a directory for its configuration files,
something like /etc/tarsnap.d where all configuration files in the directory are combined as one. The other thing that would be handy for that purpose would be the ability to specify the directories and files to include (or a default for them if none are specified on the commandline) in the configuration file too. While it is possible to work around that with a wrapper script of course it would make a modular backup (e.g. the Puppet MySQL module says backup /var/lib/mysql, the apache virtualhost module says backup /var/www/
foo.example.com but to exclude /var/www/
foo.example.com/logs because that could get too large,...).