Re: Does tarsnap-keygen force unique machine-name's ?

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On 09/04/17 20:03, Lonnie Abelbeck wrote:
> 1) Does tarsnap-keygen force unique machine-name's ?  In other words if a
> previously registered tarsnap.key with --machine foo and later another
> "tarsnap-keygen --machine foo ..." was attempted will that fail with an
> error ?

No.  Machine names are purely for user convenience; you could use the same
name for all of them if you want.  (But if you do, you'll have trouble when
you lose a key and need to ask me to delete the inaccessible data for you.)

> 2) Is it best practice to create a single snapshot archive containing all
> the desired files, or would creating 2 or 3 snapshot archives all at the
> same time with non-overlaping scopes for organization and restore purposes
> be useful ?
> 
> It would seem 2 or 3 snapshot archives might add some extra metadata
> overhead and would probably take longer to archive, but for relatively
> small appliance-like systems would the organization benefit of 2 or 3
> snapshot archives ever be useful?

The per-archive overhead is minimal -- on the order of 1 kB.  Creating
separate archives can be a good idea since it will be faster to extract a
file from a small archive than from a large archive (since tarsnap has to
fetch the tar archive headers and look through them to find the file you
want); that only applies if you know that all the data you want to restore
was part of the same archive, of course.

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