Tarsnap
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tarsnap is a secure online backup service for UNIX-like operating systems, including BSD, Linux, and OS X. It was created in 2008 by Colin Percival. Tarsnap encrypts data, and then stores it on Amazon S3.
| Tarsnap | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Original author | Colin Percival |
| Developer | Colin Percival |
| Initial release | 25 April 2008[1] |
| Stable release | 1.0.41[2]
/ 21 March 2025 |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Unix-like |
| Platform | Cross-platform[3] |
| Size | 763.9 kB |
| Type | Online backup service |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | www |
| Repository | |
| As of | January 2016 |
Service
The service is designed for efficiency, only uploading and storing data that has directly changed since the last backup.[4] Its security keys are known only to the user.[5]
It was developed and debugged, with input solicited from bug bounty hunters, to try to find vulnerabilities.[6] A serious nonce-reuse vulnerability was found by this process and fixed in 2011.[7]
The document of the presentation "From bsdtar to tarsnap"[8] by Percival from EuroBSD-Con 2013 contains "all kinds of detail on exactly how the algorithms work, how deduplication is managed ... the innards of how Tarsnap works"[9]