To an extent, anyway. I moved to Borgmatic precisely because the restore speed on Tarsnap made it unsuitable for my needs. Unfortunately I didn't uncover this problem until I actually needed to restore, which extended an outage by about half a day. Having a vague sense of the tool's performance is a good thing, I think.
Yes, as long-time Tarsnap users, we got a very unpleasant shock a few months ago when our main server literally went pop one morning and we needed to do a full restore of everything to get the replacement up and running. It took many times longer than we were expecting to download all the data, and consequently caused us extra days of unnecessary downtime.
To his credit, Colin was responsive when we asked for advice and did suggest something we could try to make things a bit faster (which it did). But really, when you’ve just had a catastrophic failure, messing around hand-holding your backup tool just to get your essential data restored as quickly as possible shouldn’t be needed. Backup tools need to Just Work, quickly and reliably, every time.
Given that Tarsnap also seems to work out very expensive these days, it’s now in the category of software where I’m happy to have used it and it did do its job even if not ideally, but unless there are dramatic improvements on both counts in the near future I think we’ll probably be looking for another option.