Re: Copy/migrate archives/history with a new key?

[Graham Percival <gperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On 2025-08-27, creed-january-twig@duck.com wrote:
> I had some remaining issues/doubts. Would appreciate some more help.
> 
> How do you all tarsnap-gui users pass the key passphrase? (For cli 'security find-…/get-…' could be used I guess.)

I think tarsnap-gui assumes that the user would type in the passphrase
whenever needed.  If you're looking for an automated method, I recommend
generating a new key (possibly only with "write" ability)

> tarsnap-gui adds prefix "Job_{job name}" to archives created by scheduled backups. Is there any workaround to control this archive naming?

The only workaround I can think of would be editing the source code and
recompiling.

The "Job_{job name}" idea is so that if you run tarsnap-gui with only
the key (for example, if you're on a new machine and need to recover an
archive), tarsnap-gui can figure out which archives belong to which job.

An alternate method would be to keep track of which archives belong to
which job in the tarsnap-gui's tarsnap.db -- but that would only work as
long as you use a system with "tarsnap.db" on it.  If something happens
to your computer and all you have is the tarsnap keyfile, it wouldn't be
able to recover.

That said, I can't think of any problem with having a user-configurable
job prefix, so I'll look into implementing that.  For recovery, it
should be relatively obvious to the user what that prefix is, just by
looking at the list of archives.

> tarsnap-gui doesn't have a "-X/-I file" option (can include in UI though), will the GUI then read these from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/tarsnap.conf?:

I'm 99% confident that it won't read tarsnap.conf.

> tarsnap-gui has "Skip operating system junk" defaults as: .DS_Store:.localized:.fseventsd:.Spotlight-V100:._.Trashes:.Trashes". Are these  same as putting "exclude .DS_Store", "exclude .localized"… lines in the conf file?

Yes, they're passed to tarsnap via --exclude.

> I am also facing the mojibake issue after I restored a folder (non English file names in it).

Yikes, that's definitely a bad bug that I'll look into.

Regards,
- Graham