How do you do it if you have lots of dynamic and usergenerated content, and have to do it from a live server? How often should it be done?
Any experiences?
It seems like a great service, and judging by your comments here I'm sure it's a rock solid solution. But I think you need a pretty serious design/usability/marketing effort before it will take off.
Btw this isn't meant to be degrading in any way, just a suggestion from a fellow HN'er ;-)
If you haven't used tarsnap, you haven't seen the worst of the lacking web design -- the tarsnap web management interface (aka. accounting interface) is minimalist to an extreme. But I think this is the right way to go -- I could be making the web interface look nice right now, but instead I'm writing code for automatically processing incoming payments... and at the end of the day, being able to sign up, send in some money, download the tarsnap code, and start storing backups in a matter of minutes is probably preferable to signing up, sending in some money, and then looking at a beautifully designed website for the 0-10 hours before I'm next awake and able to process the payment.
Making things look nice can happen later -- for now I'd prefer to have the most solid system I can produce so that everybody who uses tarsnap can enthusiastically recommend it to their friends.
Just wanted to point it out :-)
Ping me if you ever want some help with usability.