Original author(s) Development status Active | Developer(s) Colin Percival Written in C | |
Initial release 25 April 2008; 8 years ago (2008-04-25) Stable release 1.0.37 / 10 March 2016; 12 months ago (2016-03-10) | ||
Tarsnap is a secure online backup service for UNIX-like operating systems, including BSD, Linux and OS X. Created in 2008 by Colin Percival, Tarsnap encrypts and stores data in Amazon S3. The service is designed for efficiency, only uploading and storing data that has directly changed since the last backup. Its security keys are known only to the user.
It was developed and debugged, with input solicited from bug-bounty hunters, to try to find vulnerabilities. An inadvertent yet serious nonce-reuse vulnerability was found by this process and fixed in 2011.
The document of the presentation “From bsdtar to tarsnap” by Percival from EuroBSD-Con 2013 "contains all kinds of detail on exactly how the algorithms work, how deduplication is managed .. the innards of how Tarsnap works .."
Tarsnap has been criticized for being a good backup service with a woefully non-serious approach to business.