Tarsnap is a secure online backup service for
UNIX
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...
-like operating systems, including
BSD
The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...
,
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
, and
OS X
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
. It was created in 2008 by
Colin Percival
Colin A. Percival (born 1980) is a Canadian computer scientist and computer security researcher. He completed his undergraduate education at Simon Fraser University and a doctorate at the University of Oxford. While at university he joined the F ...
. Tarsnap encrypts data, and then stores it on
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its e- ...
.
Service
The service is designed for efficiency, only uploading and storing data that has directly changed since the last backup.
Its security keys are known only to the user.
It was developed and debugged, with input solicited from
bug bounty
A bug bounty program is a deal offered by many websites, organizations and software developers by which individuals can receive recognition and compensation for reporting bugs, especially those pertaining to security exploits and vulnerabilit ...
hunters, to try to find vulnerabilities.
A serious
nonce-reuse vulnerability was found by this process and fixed in 2011.
The document of the presentation "From bsdtar to tarsnap"
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"
See also
*
Comparison of online backup services
This is a comparison of online backup services.
Online backup is a special kind of online storage service; however, various products that are designed for file storage may not have features or characteristics that others designed for backup have ...
References
External links
* {{Official website
Tarsnap presentation on crowd-sourcing bug bounties
Online backup services
Backup software
File hosting
Cloud storage
Web services
Network file systems
S3