Daemonic Dispatches

Tarsnap mailing lists

If you Google for tarsnap, you can find a lot of tarsnap users doing interesting things. For example, Tim Bishop wrote a shell script for automating tarsnap backups; Mads Jorgensen wrote a similar shell script for organizing his backups; Justin Haynes created a SlackBuild for tarsnap; Aaron Schaefer create an Arch Linux PKGBUILD for tarsnap; any many tarsnap users have blogged about their experiences. Until now, however, there hasn't been any good way for tarsnap users to connect with each other.

After a couple of months of saying "soon", I've finally found time to create some tarsnap mailing lists. At the moment there are four lists:

• tarsnap-announce@tarsnap.com, which I will use to announce new versions of the tarsnap client code and anything else I think is relevant to a large subset of tarsnap users (however, I reserve the right to email all registered tarsnap users if there's anything absolutely essential that tarsnap users hear about);
• tarsnap-users@tarsnap.com, which is a general discussion list for tarsnap users;
• tarsnap-alphatest@tarsnap.com, which is a list for anyone who wants early access to new versions of the tarsnap client code (especially if they can test it on obscure platforms and make sure that I haven't broken anything); and
• scrypt@tarsnap.com, which is a list for discussion of the scrypt key derivation function.

I've also created a #tarsnap channel on EFnet for general tarsnap-related discussion.

Obviously, I'm subscribed to all of these lists and am usually on the IRC channel; but the main purpose of these (the -announce list excepted) is to allow for communication between tarsnap users. You can always email me directly about any tarsnap-related questions or problems, but in most cases the collective wisdom of tarsnap users is likely to be able to help more than just my own attempts.

Next up on the "improving communication with tarsnap users" to-do list: Creating web-accessible archives for the mailing lists; and creating a slightly less minimalist tarsnap website. Watch this space!

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