Re: Feasability of using tarsnap on crap internet connections

[Garance AE Drosehn <gadcode@earthlink.net>]

On Nov 5, 2015, at 5:16 PM, Quinn Comendant <quinn@strangecode.com> wrote:
> 
> 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. 
> 
> Does anybody suggest that tarsnap might be the wrong tool to use under such circumstances?

One thing you might do is break up the data you want to save into different archives.  You can pick specific directories to archive, for instance, and that will take much less time to archive than doing the entire disk.

So you could have one set of tarsnap archives for the Documents folder under your userid.  And then another set for whatever folder has the next most important group of data for you (perhaps Pictures, for instance).  And then make a third archive which is your entire home directory *except* for Documents and Pictures.

This way even if it takes a long time to backup your entire disk, you can at least make sure the most-important collections of data are completely backed up before you spend time backing up other files which wouldn't mean as much to you.

I would suggest that you don't try to get *too* clever with this.  It's still nice to back up all the data, and to be reasonably sure that you really do have all the data.  For instance you're going to be really sad if you didn't happen to backup the ~/Library folder in your home directory, and that might be easy to overlook because Apple hides that folder so you won't see it when using the finder.

But if it's going to take you *weeks* to do a full backup, then start out by saving the files which would hurt the most if your hard disk dies tomorrow morning.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =  gadcode@earthlink.net
Senior Systems Programmer           or       gad@FreeBSD.org