Re: a gui tarsnap backup tool

This could be a great tool to reach out to a wider market for tarsnap, more home and office users who aren't keen to twiddle the cli. That said, you might have to maintain a functional pre-compiled binary with an easy installer. My guess is that anyone who can compile a program is more than ok with setting up a backup solution that runs from a script, personally i prefer it.

(potentially stupid shit from a person who hasn't seen the interface yet)

You might wanna make sure that keyhandling is made clear and simple to the user (print it, store it safe, exporting, importing, etc), as it is one of the bigger obstacles compared to some other backup services that doesn't offer decent client side encryption.

Great initiative, especially if it can offer a no-brainer function on windows. (rather than going the cygwin route)

p.s. sorry for double mailing you mr. Gulbrandsen, i failed at sending this mail to the correct addr.

On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 2:07 PM, Arnt Gulbrandsen <arnt@gulbrandsen.priv.no> wrote:

Hi,

I have a feeling that many of you aren't very keen on pointing and clicking. Could that be right? But you'll still be interested in heading about the GUI backup thing I'm writing for tarsnap.

The thing has two goals. 1) Perform a backup by selecting what's to be backed up and what not, rather than writing a long command line. 2) Write a script to repeat that same backup. There is much else a program could do, but those are the two actual goals. (I care more about writing a modifiable script, Colin Percival more about executing a backup.)

I would welcome any kind of comment.

Here's how to build the program:

git clone http://github.com/arnt/tarsnap-gui.git
cd tarsnap-gui
qmake
make

It uses Qt; any version from the past few years should do. Quite likely it builds and works on Windows and Mac as well as the Real OSes, but I haven't tested either Windows or Mac.

Arnt