When Drew first do a "Show HN" [0] (before it was a thing, actually), there were a lot of response about how it doesn't do anything new that couldn't be already done by a technical inclined person (see the first two top comments in the posts).
To make a comparison with tarsnap, while it's probably possible to do encrypted backup manually with a combination of shellscript and such, there are just too many moving pieces that can go wrong. Where do you store the backup? Someone mentions S3, but even managing backup on S3 with deduplication is not something trivial, and managing the encryption process is definitely not something most of us can say with confident we won't mess up. I can imagine a thousand way that I encrypt something, then unable to decrypt it back.
And then maintenance is also an issue, if I'm using a set of OSS tools, I would have to make sure the tool is being maintained, and to follow any potential disclosure on bug/ updates etc. With Tarsnap, I know I will get an email from cperciva if something comes up.
As I already stated I never said you or I or most people should write our own encryption tools.
There are many open source backup tools. They offer a wide range of features such as data deduplication, references/hard links to simulate total backups without copying unchanged files, data compression, data encryption, logging, reporting, remote storage and/or remote sync.
Not all tools offer all features. Not all features work the same way, but there are many options.
Those that don't offer remote storage/sync can be setup very simply to backup locally and then sync/copy to your remote file store of choice - another server, s3, rsync.net, etc
The majority of these tools are shipped as part of Linux distribution repos, so there are almost certainly many more people using them, and multiple people with a vested interest in maintaining them.
And for reference, I agree with the comment(s) about Dropbox. The only difference is that they offer a more intuitive GUI which so far is lacking in open solutions.
I didn't mention writing encryption tools, I was simply saying that plugging all the available tools to use together is non-trivial.
Tarsnap to encrypted backup is what dropbox to file syncing (to a certain extent, obviously). I can understand why for someone knowledgeable like you, the benefit isn't obvious, just like we don't see the benefit of dropbox over other tools. But certain demographics will see tarsnap/ dropbox as value added, and is willing to pay for them (with good reason, too).
I know a lot of developers who have never spin up an EC2 instance, can't get their way around setting up a server, and certainly is not interested in maintaining an offsite server for backup. To them, tarsnap with its command line provide enough simplicity to be used (of course, it can be much better, as patio11 and alot of people pointed out).
I'm talking about working tools. They either do everything when invoked, or write to a file/dir on disk that can then have rsync invoked to copy offsite.
Im talking about maybe a 4 line shell script, if that.
If someone can't handle that amount of setup, maybe they shouldn't be the person setting up mission critical backups?
