Re: Feasability of using tarsnap on crap internet connections

[Quinn Comendant <quinn@strangecode.com>]

On Thu, 5 Nov 2015 22:25:38 +0000, Colin Percival wrote:
> How long does it drop for?

For the most part it drops only momentarily. I only notice because a SSH connection is lost, or my VPN disconnects and immediately re-connects. It's as if a bird flew in front of the antenna's line-of-sight.

> network outages of under 5 minutes shouldn't be a
> problem at all.  If you use the --retry-forever option, it will do what you
> expect, too.

Fabulous! That makes this situation much more reasonable. 

>> 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`?
> 
> I'd go with something like `tarsnap --list-archives | fgrep -v .part 
> | sort |
> tail -1` to get your most recent full archive.

But I didn't mean the "most recent"; I meant "the full archive older than 7 days ago" (in this hypothetical scenario, let's assume I know that I was infected with malware 6.5 days ago and don't trust any backups after that day).

Quinn