Tarsnap GUI for the desktop

[Shinnok <admin@shinnok.com>]

Greetings to all gents and ladies,

I bring fresh news from the Tarsnap pit.

I have been working hard for the last 6 months on a desktop application frontend for the awesome Tarsnap service. Most of you are using Tarsnap as it was designed, from the command line, usually on the server side and in scripts, however some people, like me, feel the need to benefit from the same Tarsnap juice from the comfort of the desktop too, with ease, for common tasks and swift backups. Another important aspect is that it is so easy to create complex and custom backup schemes using the tarsnap command line utilities, that are adhering to the Unix philosophy and thus can easily be used like an API, that I genuinely found an opportunity for creating a backup application that I would be the first user of and would put my lack of patience, trust and overall pessimism regarding existing solutions at rest.

This is where I introduce Tarsnap for the desktop, a cross-platform, open source (BSD 2 clause) modern desktop application acting as a wrapper around the Tarsnap command line utilities, written in C++ and using the Qt 5 framework. You need to install the command line Tarsnap client before you can use the application. Given that Tarsnap doesn't provide any binary redistributables for the CLI utilities on any platform at the moment, there's none for this desktop app either. This might be subject to change in the future.

The project page and code is hosted at your favorite host, Github:
https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui

To get started all you have to do is:
$git clone https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui.git && cd tarsnap-gui
$git checkout v0.5
$less README

The application currently has 3 main usage patterns:

1. The Backup tab allows you to quickly backup files and directories in a single shot fashion;
2. The Archives tab lists all of the archives that have been created using the current machine key. You can inspect, restore and delete archives from this view;
3. The Jobs tab. A job is a predefined set of directories and files, as well as backup preferences, that you know are going to be backed up regularly; These are persistent (in a local Sqlite DB) and you can attend to them whenever you wish afterwards; 

The other tabs are Settings and Help, which hopefully are self explanatory. See the distribution files README, CHANGELOG and COPYING for information on respective matters.

The current version is 0.5 and is considered beta until otherwise announced. There are rough edges around the corners and lots more ground to cover when it comes to functionality and Tarsnap options breadth and depth coverage. All development will now take place in the open, thus I'd like to start the conversation here and encourage contribution and review on GitHub.

Read this Wiki page and the announcement summary on my blog for more details and some beautiful screenshots:
https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/wiki/Tarsnap
http://shinnok.com/rants/2015/06/11/tarsnap-frontend-released/

To conclude, if you're a lazy desktop user like me, you're a perfect fit, be an early adopter and start using it now so we can get it further. :-)
I do advise you to create a new key for this desktop session, it's generally best practice and a safe-guard given that the application is still in beta.

Cheers,
Shinnok