6 ms·

Tarsnap GUI for the desktop

163 points by antonios 11y ago

4lun 11y ago
Screenshots here: https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/wiki/Tarsnap#screenshots https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/wiki/Tarsnap#screensh...
- Pephers 11y ago
  Thanks for the link. My guess is that this is what most people are after :)
Robin_Message 11y ago
It's worth noting that Colin blesses this as a public beta in a reply – http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg01124.html http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg01124.html. But I would be interested to know more of what (if any) the commercial relationship is?
- cperciva 11y ago
  But I would be interested to know more of what (if any) the commercial relationship is? Tarsnap Backup Inc. funded this development, and is continuing to fund work on this.
icebraining 11y ago
Text-wrapped version: I bring fresh news from the Tarsnap pit. I have been working hard for the last 6 months on a desktop application frontend for the awesome Tarsnap service. Most of you are using Tarsnap as it was designed, from the command line, usually on the server side and in scripts, however some people, like me, feel the need to benefit from the same Tarsnap juice from the comfort of the desktop too, with ease, for common tasks and swift backups. Another important aspect is that it is so easy to create complex and custom backup schemes using the tarsnap command line utilities, that are adhering to the Unix philosophy and thus can easily be used like an API, that I genuinely found an opportunity for creating a backup application that I would be the first user of and would put my lack of patience, trust and overall pessimism regarding existing solutions at rest. This is where I introduce Tarsnap for the desktop, a cross-platform, open source (BSD 2 clause) modern desktop application acting as a wrapper around the Tarsnap command line utilities, written in C++ and using the Qt 5 framework. You need to install the command line Tarsnap client before you can use the application. Given that Tarsnap doesn't provide any binary redistributables for the CLI utilities on any platform at the moment, there's none for this desktop app either. This might be subject to change in the future. The project page and code is hosted at your favorite host, Github: https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui To get started all you have to do is: $git clone https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui.git && cd tarsnap-gui $git checkout v0.5 $less README The application currently has 3 main usage patterns: 1. The Backup tab allows you to quickly backup files and directories in a single shot fashion; 2. The Archives tab lists all of the archives that have been created using the current machine key. You can inspect, restore and delete archives from this view; 3. The Jobs tab. A job is a predefined set of directories and files, as well as backup preferences, that you know are going to be backed up regularly; These are persistent (in a local Sqlite DB) and you can attend to them whenever you wish afterwards; The other tabs are Settings and Help, which hopefully are self explanatory. See the distribution files README, CHANGELOG and COPYING for information on respective matters. The current version is 0.5 and is considered beta until otherwise announced. There are rough edges around the corners and lots more ground to cover when it comes to functionality and Tarsnap options breadth and depth coverage. All development will now take place in the open, thus I'd like to start the conversation here and encourage contribution and review on GitHub. Read this Wiki page and the announcement summary on my blog for more details and some beautiful screenshots: https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/wiki/Tarsnap http://shinnok.com/rants/2015/06/11/tarsnap-frontend-released/ To conclude, if you're a lazy desktop user like me, you're a perfect fit, be an early adopter and start using it now so we can get it further. :-) I do advise you to create a new key for this desktop session, it's generally best practice and a safe-guard given that the application is still in beta. Cheers, Shinnok
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- maxerickson 11y ago
  Here's a bookmarklet for adding wrap to pre elements, useful for readers of mailing list archives: https://gist.github.com/maxerickson/ed79ebefd7303d416490 https://gist.github.com/maxerickson/ed79ebefd7303d416490 There's lots of implementations of the idea, I don't remember if I copied it from somewhere or not.
INTPenis 11y ago
Did anyone else get a blocked notice in their corporate bluecoat filter? Bluecoat blocks the strangest things sometimes but this was amusing to me because I work at a "cloud hosting provider" and essentially tarsnap could be seen as a competitor to some services that we sell, but we don't focus solely on *nix systems.
qnm 11y ago
Looks good. I think it's time to try tarsnap again. I recall that there was this one GUI tool[1] for OSX but I was never able to get it to work correctly. [1] https://github.com/casperstorm/Bob https://github.com/casperstorm/Bob
- cperciva 11y ago
  There have been a few attempts at GUIs over the years. I'm hoping that this one will turn out well; I think it's already more functional than any of the others, and it's being actively developed.
nailer 11y ago
FYI front page of tarsnap.com: > At the present time, Tarsnap does not have a graphical user interface. Might want to update (and add some screenshots). And maybe make the price calculator live.
- cperciva 11y ago
  All in due time. This is a first public beta; I'd like it to get some testing from the community (including feedback on use cases) before I promote it too much to new users.
jacques_chester 11y ago
I once asked Colin Percival about doing an OS X front end as a commercial product, to be sold independently, because tarnsap is awesome and the user experience isn't. Nothing came of it because he is sticking to his licensing, which would mean telling users to first install XCode before installing the GUI. It didn't seem like that would be a winner, so I moved on to other things. I greatly admire that he stuck to his position.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Couldn't it be done in the age-old tradition of UNIX/Linux GUI frontends to command line apps? It seems like your installer (or the GUI app itself, on first run) could do all the work of downloading the Tarsnap source, compiling it and then simply launch the CLI program to execute the actions. It'd take some dev work to set it all up, but could be transparent for the user.
  - koenigdavidmj 11y ago
    On OS X that requires downloading a 2 GB package (Xcode) first to install the compiler and such. Users would rightly think that's overkill for a backup tool.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Didn't that change a few years ago when they released the Command Line Tools for Xcode?
      - sigjuice 11y ago
        Yes. Also, installing the command line tools on a pristine system is easy and does not require downloading Xcode. Typing cc in Terminal will pop up a dialog box that will offer to install the CLT.
  - revelation 11y ago
    So none of the verifiability/security, all of the hassle? Right, that sounds very much like the "age-old tradition of UNIX/Linux GUI".
hybridtupel 11y ago
It's not directly related to the gui but I see the tarsnap service for the first time. The last release of tarsnap was two years ago. Is it so secure that there were not even bug fixes necessary since then? Apart from that the service with the gui looks quite promising to me and is totally worth a try.
- cperciva 11y ago
  The last release of tarsnap was two years ago. Yes, well, err... cough. I've been spending most of my time for the past two years managing the server side of things, but there will be a new release soon and hopefully more active client development after that. Part of the reason this GUI is on github is that I'm in the process of moving my local client code tree up there (aka. going through the fixes I've made over the past two years and filling in commit messages).
- merijnv 11y ago
  Where are you getting this from? The latest release on the website is from February 2015, as near as I can tell. Or at least, that's when it was signed.
  - cperciva 11y ago
    I re-signed the tarball when the signing key expired.
jasonkester 11y ago
I can't help but chuckle, seeing the "user friendly GUI" arrive as a wall-of-text mailing list message linking to a source code repository. No homepage, No installer, not even a screenshot. "There exists code you can compile. Someplace. QED." Congratulations for staying true to form!
- cperciva 11y ago
  The rest will come once this has had more testing. This is a first public beta and the move of code from private development to public development; it's not ready yet for people who would be scared off by needing to compile it.
- anc84 11y ago
  These are the URLs for you: https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/wiki/Tarsnap https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/wiki/Tarsnap http://shinnok.com/rants/2015/06/11/tarsnap-frontend-released/ http://shinnok.com/rants/2015/06/11/tarsnap-frontend-release...
- Dewie3 11y ago
  And I need to scroll horizontally to read the whole page. Though I guess it's easy to copy/paste into a text editor and read it there since the text is so plain.
gjm11 11y ago
While we're discussing making Tarsnap more user-friendly: The single reason (other than, er, fecklessness on my part) why I haven't tried Tarsnap is that it seems difficult to predict how much using Tarsnap would actually cost me. I would need to know (1) how much space my data will take up after compression and deduplication, and (2) how much bandwidth my incremental backups will need -- again, after compression and deduplication. Wouldn't It Be Nice If there were a "predict my Tarsnap costs" tool? You download it and point it at your data. It compresses it and identifies duplicated blocks, and says "You would initially be storing about 25 GB of data on the Tarsnap servers, which will cost you about $6.70 per month." It records a bunch of hashes. Then, a little later, you run it again. It identifies changed blocks and compresses the differences (or something), and says "If you do an incremental update like this, you will transfer about 2GB of data, which will cost you about $0.54." With, each time, a disclaimer: "This is only a crude estimate and if you think Tarsnap, Inc., will be in any way bound by it then you're out of your mind." I'm not sure whether this is a thing that any random third-party person could write, or whether getting the numbers right would require information about exactly what happens on the Tarsnap servers that only Colin has. Perhaps the answer is that doing it right requires secret information, but doing it well enough (e.g., getting within 20%, 95% of the time) is easy with some naive algorithm like "divide everything into 4kB blocks, hash them all, identify duplicates, compress individual unique blocks with gzip; do the same for incremental updates but ignore blocks whose hash hasn't changed". I'm curious: is this a factor stopping other people signing up with Tarsnap? Is it perhaps only a factor for cheapskate individuals like me, and not for the larger organizations that probably represent most of Tarsnap's profits?
- neilk 11y ago
  The thing that's keeping you from using Tarsnap is its costs? The deltas you're talking about look like they are under $10. It sounds like you are a programmer. At an hourly rate, it probably cost you more just to write that comment.
  - recursive 11y ago
    No, predictability of costs.
normaldotcom 11y ago
Just packaged it up for Arch Linux (user repository): http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/tarsnap-gui-git/ http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/tarsnap-gui-git/
- warmwaffles 11y ago
  Make sure you also release it under AUR4 too
- cperciva 11y ago
  The license is BSD, not GPLv2...
  - normaldotcom 11y ago
    Thanks, I'll update it shortly.
pronoiac 11y ago
There's a mention of scheduling backups in the Github repo, as an upcoming feature, but in the meantime, here's my tarsnap-cron: https://github.com/pronoiac/tarsnap-cron https://github.com/pronoiac/tarsnap-cron

163 points by antonios 11y ago

4lun 11y ago

Screenshots here: https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/wiki/Tarsnap#screenshots https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/wiki/Tarsnap#screensh...

Pephers 11y ago
Thanks for the link. My guess is that this is what most people are after :)

Robin_Message 11y ago

It's worth noting that Colin blesses this as a public beta in a reply – http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg01124.html http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg01124.html. But I would be interested to know more of what (if any) the commercial relationship is?

cperciva 11y ago
But I would be interested to know more of what (if any) the commercial relationship is? Tarsnap Backup Inc. funded this development, and is continuing to fund work on this.

icebraining 11y ago

Text-wrapped version: I bring fresh news from the Tarsnap pit. I have been working hard for the last 6 months on a desktop application frontend for the awesome Tarsnap service. Most of you are using Tarsnap as it was designed, from the command line, usually on the server side and in scripts, however some people, like me, feel the need to benefit from the same Tarsnap juice from the comfort of the desktop too, with ease, for common tasks and swift backups. Another important aspect is that it is so easy to create complex and custom backup schemes using the tarsnap command line utilities, that are adhering to the Unix philosophy and thus can easily be used like an API, that I genuinely found an opportunity for creating a backup application that I would be the first user of and would put my lack of patience, trust and overall pessimism regarding existing solutions at rest. This is where I introduce Tarsnap for the desktop, a cross-platform, open source (BSD 2 clause) modern desktop application acting as a wrapper around the Tarsnap command line utilities, written in C++ and using the Qt 5 framework. You need to install the command line Tarsnap client before you can use the application. Given that Tarsnap doesn't provide any binary redistributables for the CLI utilities on any platform at the moment, there's none for this desktop app either. This might be subject to change in the future. The project page and code is hosted at your favorite host, Github: https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui To get started all you have to do is: $git clone https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui.git && cd tarsnap-gui $git checkout v0.5 $less README The application currently has 3 main usage patterns: 1. The Backup tab allows you to quickly backup files and directories in a single shot fashion; 2. The Archives tab lists all of the archives that have been created using the current machine key. You can inspect, restore and delete archives from this view; 3. The Jobs tab. A job is a predefined set of directories and files, as well as backup preferences, that you know are going to be backed up regularly; These are persistent (in a local Sqlite DB) and you can attend to them whenever you wish afterwards; The other tabs are Settings and Help, which hopefully are self explanatory. See the distribution files README, CHANGELOG and COPYING for information on respective matters. The current version is 0.5 and is considered beta until otherwise announced. There are rough edges around the corners and lots more ground to cover when it comes to functionality and Tarsnap options breadth and depth coverage. All development will now take place in the open, thus I'd like to start the conversation here and encourage contribution and review on GitHub. Read this Wiki page and the announcement summary on my blog for more details and some beautiful screenshots: https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/wiki/Tarsnap http://shinnok.com/rants/2015/06/11/tarsnap-frontend-released/ To conclude, if you're a lazy desktop user like me, you're a perfect fit, be an early adopter and start using it now so we can get it further. :-) I do advise you to create a new key for this desktop session, it's generally best practice and a safe-guard given that the application is still in beta. Cheers, Shinnok

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
maxerickson 11y ago
Here's a bookmarklet for adding wrap to pre elements, useful for readers of mailing list archives: https://gist.github.com/maxerickson/ed79ebefd7303d416490 https://gist.github.com/maxerickson/ed79ebefd7303d416490 There's lots of implementations of the idea, I don't remember if I copied it from somewhere or not.

INTPenis 11y ago

Did anyone else get a blocked notice in their corporate bluecoat filter? Bluecoat blocks the strangest things sometimes but this was amusing to me because I work at a "cloud hosting provider" and essentially tarsnap could be seen as a competitor to some services that we sell, but we don't focus solely on *nix systems.

qnm 11y ago

Looks good. I think it's time to try tarsnap again. I recall that there was this one GUI tool[1] for OSX but I was never able to get it to work correctly. [1] https://github.com/casperstorm/Bob https://github.com/casperstorm/Bob

cperciva 11y ago
There have been a few attempts at GUIs over the years. I'm hoping that this one will turn out well; I think it's already more functional than any of the others, and it's being actively developed.

nailer 11y ago

FYI front page of tarsnap.com: > At the present time, Tarsnap does not have a graphical user interface. Might want to update (and add some screenshots). And maybe make the price calculator live.

cperciva 11y ago
All in due time. This is a first public beta; I'd like it to get some testing from the community (including feedback on use cases) before I promote it too much to new users.

jacques_chester 11y ago

I once asked Colin Percival about doing an OS X front end as a commercial product, to be sold independently, because tarnsap is awesome and the user experience isn't. Nothing came of it because he is sticking to his licensing, which would mean telling users to first install XCode before installing the GUI. It didn't seem like that would be a winner, so I moved on to other things. I greatly admire that he stuck to his position.

icebraining 11y ago
Couldn't it be done in the age-old tradition of UNIX/Linux GUI frontends to command line apps? It seems like your installer (or the GUI app itself, on first run) could do all the work of downloading the Tarsnap source, compiling it and then simply launch the CLI program to execute the actions. It'd take some dev work to set it all up, but could be transparent for the user.
- koenigdavidmj 11y ago
  On OS X that requires downloading a 2 GB package (Xcode) first to install the compiler and such. Users would rightly think that's overkill for a backup tool.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Didn't that change a few years ago when they released the Command Line Tools for Xcode?
    - sigjuice 11y ago
      Yes. Also, installing the command line tools on a pristine system is easy and does not require downloading Xcode. Typing cc in Terminal will pop up a dialog box that will offer to install the CLT.
- revelation 11y ago
  So none of the verifiability/security, all of the hassle? Right, that sounds very much like the "age-old tradition of UNIX/Linux GUI".

hybridtupel 11y ago

It's not directly related to the gui but I see the tarsnap service for the first time. The last release of tarsnap was two years ago. Is it so secure that there were not even bug fixes necessary since then? Apart from that the service with the gui looks quite promising to me and is totally worth a try.

cperciva 11y ago
The last release of tarsnap was two years ago. Yes, well, err... cough. I've been spending most of my time for the past two years managing the server side of things, but there will be a new release soon and hopefully more active client development after that. Part of the reason this GUI is on github is that I'm in the process of moving my local client code tree up there (aka. going through the fixes I've made over the past two years and filling in commit messages).
merijnv 11y ago
Where are you getting this from? The latest release on the website is from February 2015, as near as I can tell. Or at least, that's when it was signed.
- cperciva 11y ago
  I re-signed the tarball when the signing key expired.

jasonkester 11y ago

I can't help but chuckle, seeing the "user friendly GUI" arrive as a wall-of-text mailing list message linking to a source code repository. No homepage, No installer, not even a screenshot. "There exists code you can compile. Someplace. QED." Congratulations for staying true to form!

cperciva 11y ago
The rest will come once this has had more testing. This is a first public beta and the move of code from private development to public development; it's not ready yet for people who would be scared off by needing to compile it.
anc84 11y ago
These are the URLs for you: https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/wiki/Tarsnap https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/wiki/Tarsnap http://shinnok.com/rants/2015/06/11/tarsnap-frontend-released/ http://shinnok.com/rants/2015/06/11/tarsnap-frontend-release...
Dewie3 11y ago
And I need to scroll horizontally to read the whole page. Though I guess it's easy to copy/paste into a text editor and read it there since the text is so plain.

gjm11 11y ago

While we're discussing making Tarsnap more user-friendly: The single reason (other than, er, fecklessness on my part) why I haven't tried Tarsnap is that it seems difficult to predict how much using Tarsnap would actually cost me. I would need to know (1) how much space my data will take up after compression and deduplication, and (2) how much bandwidth my incremental backups will need -- again, after compression and deduplication. Wouldn't It Be Nice If there were a "predict my Tarsnap costs" tool? You download it and point it at your data. It compresses it and identifies duplicated blocks, and says "You would initially be storing about 25 GB of data on the Tarsnap servers, which will cost you about $6.70 per month." It records a bunch of hashes. Then, a little later, you run it again. It identifies changed blocks and compresses the differences (or something), and says "If you do an incremental update like this, you will transfer about 2GB of data, which will cost you about $0.54." With, each time, a disclaimer: "This is only a crude estimate and if you think Tarsnap, Inc., will be in any way bound by it then you're out of your mind." I'm not sure whether this is a thing that any random third-party person could write, or whether getting the numbers right would require information about exactly what happens on the Tarsnap servers that only Colin has. Perhaps the answer is that doing it right requires secret information, but doing it well enough (e.g., getting within 20%, 95% of the time) is easy with some naive algorithm like "divide everything into 4kB blocks, hash them all, identify duplicates, compress individual unique blocks with gzip; do the same for incremental updates but ignore blocks whose hash hasn't changed". I'm curious: is this a factor stopping other people signing up with Tarsnap? Is it perhaps only a factor for cheapskate individuals like me, and not for the larger organizations that probably represent most of Tarsnap's profits?

neilk 11y ago
The thing that's keeping you from using Tarsnap is its costs? The deltas you're talking about look like they are under $10. It sounds like you are a programmer. At an hourly rate, it probably cost you more just to write that comment.
- recursive 11y ago
  No, predictability of costs.

normaldotcom 11y ago

Just packaged it up for Arch Linux (user repository): http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/tarsnap-gui-git/ http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/tarsnap-gui-git/

warmwaffles 11y ago
Make sure you also release it under AUR4 too
cperciva 11y ago
The license is BSD, not GPLv2...
- normaldotcom 11y ago
  Thanks, I'll update it shortly.

pronoiac 11y ago

There's a mention of scheduling backups in the Github repo, as an upcoming feature, but in the meantime, here's my tarsnap-cron: https://github.com/pronoiac/tarsnap-cron https://github.com/pronoiac/tarsnap-cron