Re: Question about mitigating large storage costs in case of ransomware

[Jamie Landeg-Jones <jamie@catflap.org>]

> I just started using tarsnap, and I was wondering if there exists an
> option (or the potential interest in developing an option) to put a cap
> on an archive size.

 [ ... ]

> The closest thing I could find is the --maxbw option; is there a
> corresponding option for archive size that I'm not seeing on the
> manpage?

Hi Rob.

I think you are getting --maxbw confused with --maxbw-rate:

| --maxbw numbytes
|              (c mode only) Interrupt archival if more than numbytes bytes of upstream bandwidth is used (see INTERRUPTING ARCHIVAL below for details).
| 
| --maxbw-rate bytespersecond
|              Limit download and upload bandwidth used to bytespersecond bytes per second.

I too found that a bit confusing - To me, bandwidth *is* rate, not
data-transferred, but it's not unprecedented - I use another site
that uses that terminology too.

Incidentally, I *assume* that if you use that option, if you have a
regular cron-job, it will transfer the maximum data rach time it runs,
so you'll need to spring into action with manual intervention  sooner
rather than later!

Cheers, Jamie