yes, and these tarfiles are in an entirely difficult format, have to be pruned, are the source of many mysterious bugs, and I've even had to write a "synthetic

yes, and these tarfiles are in an entirely difficult format, have to be pruned, are the source of many mysterious bugs, and I've even had to write a "synthetic backup" script of my own to automatically turn a large list of "incremental" backups into a "full" backup every night. duplicity has been doing the thing I need but I spent weeks writing tools around it. Even though duplicity is written in Python, it invents a lot of its own Python installation idioms and also is not organized to provide a usable API, so scripting for it pretty much means you have to exec it. "encrypted rsync to S3" is all I ever wanted in the first place so very much hoping this can replace it.