It seems like the guys at tarsnap have made their own application. The files are stored unencrypted, and it is the user's responsibility to encrypt them as the user sees fit, removing any limitation and not forcing the users to use only one protocol or application to store encrypted backups.
Using duplicity with a GPG key you can store your backups in an encrypted fashion.
+1 duplicity. It can backup to IMAP, meaning it can backup to gmail. Why pay $10+/mo to an online backup provider when Google provides 7GB of free storage (per captcha) inside some awesome tier1 datacenter?
If you are interested in secure backups you may want to take a look at the Tahoe Least Authority File System (http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe), which has a much more useful security model than tarsnaps (for instance, you can share read-only access rights to a particular file with someone else). Tahoe is also entirely open source and the design is well documented, which in my view is two points up for Tahoe.
Comments
I'm planning to switch to using tarsnap because of the robust security involved. Do you encrypt the backup and how? Who controls the keys?
It seems like the guys at tarsnap have made their own application. The files are stored unencrypted, and it is the user's responsibility to encrypt them as the user sees fit, removing any limitation and not forcing the users to use only one protocol or application to store encrypted backups.
Using duplicity with a GPG key you can store your backups in an encrypted fashion.
+1 duplicity. It can backup to IMAP, meaning it can backup to gmail. Why pay $10+/mo to an online backup provider when Google provides 7GB of free storage (per captcha) inside some awesome tier1 datacenter?
If you are interested in secure backups you may want to take a look at the Tahoe Least Authority File System (http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe), which has a much more useful security model than tarsnaps (for instance, you can share read-only access rights to a particular file with someone else). Tahoe is also entirely open source and the design is well documented, which in my view is two points up for Tahoe.