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

[creed-january-twig@duck.com]

> On 29 Aug 2025, at 9:15 AM, Graham Percival <gperciva_at_tarsnap.com_creed-january-twig@duck.com> wrote:
> 
> I think tarsnap-gui assumes that the user would type in the passphrase
> whenever needed.

Right :) I meant is there a way to fetch from keychain or so.

>  If you're looking for an automated method, I recommend
> generating a new key (possibly only with "write" ability)

Yeah, I had finally done that. So far just a script + cron. 
Now that I got a hang of it, I kind of believe it is pretty great 
to have a write only key and a master key (which will be anyway 
used occasionally, and mostly manually, for maintenance)

> 
>> 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.

Will check https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/blob/master/INSTALL

> 
> 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.

Yes, I also don’t think it should create a problem. For manual backups
GUI already allows naming 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.

Then I guess, if I use GUI again I can pass my entire exclude-file in 
that field colon separated (pattern1:dir_path1:pattern2:file_path2 …)

> 
>> 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.

I did some new backups. 

terminal - all those file names were uploaded non-encoded.
cron env - the those names were octal encoded. 

Because cron env didn’t have any LANG set. So I have set UTF-8 
via LC_ALL in .zshenv. Should work now.

Thanks.