Re: Does anyone want key-resistant tamper-evident archives?

[Daniel Neades <djn@araxis.com>]

Hi,

> On 8 Sep 2016, at 06:53, Raphael Bauduin <raphael.bauduin@tessares.net> wrote:
> It is interesting, but I would prefer improvements to restore speed. 
> I currently need to keep a second backup copy just in case I need a fast restore, 
> as the restore with tarsnap is unacceptably slow (last time I tested a couple of months ago).

+1

We also keep backups elsewhere, partially to spread risk, but also because Tarsnap restores are so slow.

The slow list and restore times also make testing Tarsnap backups *extremely* painful. For example, we backup dumps (4–5 GB in size) of one of our databases. We can restore a dump via SSH from a remote backup machine located on a different continent in a matter of minutes. Restoring the identical dump from Tarsnap takes hours.

I am not sure we’d have chosen Tarsnap had we realized how slow these essential and common operations would be. That said, it is good to have a secondary backup mechanism that is completely separate from our primary one, and we do very much like Tarsnap’s excellent de-duplication.

While I am requesting things, it would also be nice to have a convenient way to delete old archives built into the tarsnap command. At the moment, everyone seems to have to script their own wrappers for common operations like this. The expiration problem is compound by the fact that both listing and deleting archives is so painfully slow.

-- 
Daniel Neades
Director, Araxis Ltd
www.araxis.com