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Comment by mml | Hacker News Reader

crypted off-site backups? wait, people pay for that? wtf, crashplan is free (forever). all you need is a buddy with some disk. a tb is about a hundred bucks these days.

good luck with that tarsnap thingy.

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I think you are being downvoted for being so rude and straight but I think you make the point here. Tarsnap is shooting at the wrong target: everything about it seems to be designed to appeal geeks: the webpage style, the humor (the picodollars thing), the code to be compiled (!). Basically tarsnap is targeting the people that will never pay for this service. I am a geeky enough to recognize myself as possible target and therefore geeky enough to setup the same thing using 10 minutes of bash, truecrypt and S3 for half the prize.

Tarsnap does block-based differentials, in addition to its fancy crypto footwork. You can't set that up with bash, truecrypt, and S3.

Please don't get me wrong, it was not my intention to compare the features of tarsnap to a 10 minutes hack. I am sure there is a lot of good work behind and it looks like great code and a great project. I am also sure that a lot of businesses would be happy to pay for your service if they were directly targeted for it.

But I have no doubt the reason while your revenue doesn't make you happy yet it is because hackers are not the right target for it. I do differential backup using encFS and dropbox; it's not even remotely as cool as tarsnap but it's free for now. You see my point?

if your "backup" is on a single disk, it's not a backup

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