Feasability of using tarsnap on crap internet connections

[Quinn Comendant <quinn@strangecode.com>]

Hi all,

Another question has come up while evaluating tarsnap. I'll be uploading from a MacBook in rural Colombia, with a flapping internet connection. It is a 3Mbps radio uplink, which is sufficiently fast to upload my 400GB (pre-de-duplication) data in a month or two (initial upload), BUT the connection is intermittent: the connection usually drops several times per hour, and at worst every few minutes. I've been reading about the Interrupted Archives, and how subsequent archive creation (with a new archive name) will resume a previously interrupted one. 

It seems this *might just work*, as long as I'm using a small `checkpoint-bytes` value and an archive name with a timestamp, except that every month I will have created maybe a few thousand archives. Perhaps that's fine, if I never need to think about the archives on a human scale, instead letting a script manage their creation and rotation. Obviously if I will ever need to use the `--list-archives` or `--recover` commands this would be insane. 

How would recoveries work, with so many archives? Let's say I discovered my MacBook was compromised a week ago, and I want to do a full system restoration to the state of the files uploaded 8 days ago. Would it be as simple as running extract on the last archive with the timestamp of "8 days ago", i.e., `tarsnap -x -f backup-YYYYMMDD.SSSSSSSSSSS /`, with the most complete and consistent archive found by running something like `tarsnap --list-archives | grep YYYYMMDD | sort | tail -1`?

Does anybody suggest that tarsnap might be the wrong tool to use under such circumstances?

Thank you,

Quinn