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Add to SafariWhen comparing Tarsnap vs BackupPC, the Slant community recommends BackupPC for most people. In the question“What are the best backup programs for Linux?” BackupPC is ranked 7th while Tarsnap is ranked 9th.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Focus on encryption and deduplication
Encryption allows the use to access their files with only their own keys and the deduplication saves on costs of storage as any duplicate file will be removed automatically. So not only is the platform safety minded but cost is taken into account for the user as well.
Pro No need to worry about versioning
Pro No need to install anything more on the backed-up PC
Pro Able to handle large amount of servers and data
The disk IO can be a bootleneck but the system itself handles even multi terabyte servers easily.
Pro Supports various platforms
Backup method is highly configurable, using local copy, ssh, rsync, SMB or custom transfer, so able to backup almost any OS supporting these.
Pro Open Source
Pro Efficient disk format
The disk format automatically deduplicates files, and optionally compress files or assist recovery with redundancy information (par2); storage disk usage is very efficient.
Pro Combining full and incremental backups into "filled" view
Backups are always viewed as a whole, regardless of the count or data content of past incrementals.
Pro Rich command line tools
Apart from the Web UI there are command line tools for doing all tasks related to the backup system.
Cons
Con No automatic deletion of old backups
Users will have to manually delete their old backups as there is no way to set a threshold of when older backups should be removed.
Con Awkward setup of encryption keys
Con Version 3 on-disk format is impossible to "file-copy"
V3 format uses hard-links which is almost impossble to "file-copy" (using filesystem level tools like cp or rsync) on a large system, since the hardlink management eats up vast amounts of memory (the only way to copy a backup server is to copy using a whole-disk copying method). This has been fixed in version 4 format which uses pointer files instead of hardlinks.
Con Web UI timeouts on large amount of data to be displayed
The Web UI needs large amount of time to walk a directory with thousands of entries and it may cause the webserver or client to timeout. Large directories may require the admin to use the command line tools to list or restore files or directories.
