Instead of a critique of how Tarsnap is run, this sounds like a business proposal for a company that would offer B2B services using Tarsnap as a back-end.
They could do things like offering a flat $100 rate for what is probably $2.60 of services and then roll around in the money. Or donate some of it to Tarsnap so it will keep running.
Hmm... in many ways, it's actually not a bad idea. Especially if you partnered with Tarsnap so you could effectively do referrals to each other: send the geeks to bare-bones Tarsnap and they'd send the PHBs to you.
My first thought exactly. My second thought was - if Patrick is so convinced about this and already has such good ties with Colin, why doesn't he run this business on top of tarsnap, and they both agree on a way to share the profits.
This way, Colin can keep things his way, Patrick his way, and they both profit.
> Because being on the hook for people's backups is not my idea of a fun time, because I'd be directly competing with an Internet buddy who I'd rather see successful, because I have no particular comparative advantage in backups that I don't have in a host of better product categories, because I already run three businesses and enjoy sleeping occasionally, because running services is in fact a heck of a lot harder than posting about them, etc etc.
The point about competing is void if they collaborate (and they are already friends, so collaboration of this sort should be easy). Each does what they're best at. Patrick at marketing and reaching corporate clients. Colin at the delivering the core product and keeping on the promises of never losing your data etc.
To some extent other concerns about sleep and worrying about other people's backups is also something that Colin would take care of in my dream collaborative scenario.
So set the business up, make LONG_MAX dollars, then offer to hand it over to Colin lock, stock, and barrel if he will admit that it was a good idea all along.
If Colin does not accept, start giving the profits to the OpenBSD foundation.
OSX UI to backup your laptop, encrypted, to AWS: www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/
I don't know tarsnap well enough to compare encryption models with Arq or anything, but I'm not invested enough to dig into it either. Arq works for me as a customer, and I'm not really in the tarsnap market.
They could do things like offering a flat $100 rate for what is probably $2.60 of services and then roll around in the money. Or donate some of it to Tarsnap so it will keep running.
Hmm... in many ways, it's actually not a bad idea. Especially if you partnered with Tarsnap so you could effectively do referrals to each other: send the geeks to bare-bones Tarsnap and they'd send the PHBs to you.