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

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On 09/08/16 03:27, Arthur Chance wrote:
> A question for Colin: would it be possible for tarsnap to have a faster
> restore mode where it simply created an unencrypted tar file on the
> client equivalent to a given tarsnap archive, to be restored from as
> necessary, or does the architecture preclude it? That would at least
> speed up full restores after a crash that lost everything.

There are several things which need to be addressed in order to get
better extract performance.  Speeding up --list-archives is the simplest
(although still far from simple); next is 'tarsnap -r' (which is what you're
describing); next is a partial fix for 'tarsnap -x' which speeds up large
file extraction but has little effect on small files; and the hardest is
a full fix for 'tarsnap -x'.  The difference between these is basically just
how hard it is to figure out which blocks we need.

So yes, the plan is to do what you describe.

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid