Try to hack up a replacement to tarsnap in your spare time and you are a lot more likely to embarass yourself than to give Colin a run for his money. S3 isn't the underlying value in Tarsnap.
Nice try. If tarsnap does anything that duplicity or s3napback doesn't do, I wouldn't know it from the tarsnap website.
You are right that Tarsnap's website does a terrible job communicating the value. You're wrong about everything else. But I'm glad Colin is getting the data point here.
I haven't used Tarsnap, but it looks very similar to duplicity at a cursory glance. Are there many differences?
Yes: Tarsnap is extremely secure, and so it can be used inside companies with sensitive data without wasting time classifying what can and can't be backed up remotely.
It is like the Iron Mountain of backup solutions.
Duplicity GPG-encrypts all data too, though.
For the sake of argument (or, because you trust me on this), let's stipulate that Tarsnap is significantly more secure than duplicity; things can go wrong with duplicity (or create untenable administrative headaches) that don't with Tarsnap.