[luuse]

May be a bit OT but is there any way to create an archive locally and see the size of it before paying to figure out how much space i'd need?

Been looking at tarsnap for a while but never gotten around to actually try it and my quick naive calculations for backing up my ~ makes it sound too expensive for me even though it's probably the best alternative i've seen so far.

[cju]

Using options --dry-run and --print-stats would probably give you this information

''Don't really create an archive; just simulate doing so. The list of paths added to an archive (if the -v option is used) and statistics printed (if the --print-stats option is used) will be identical to if tarsnap is run without the --dry-run option.''

(http://www.tarsnap.com/man-tarsnap.1.html)

[luuse]

Missed the dry-run option but it still seems to require a key which requires you to pay. Talked with some on irc and it seems it's not possible at the moment. Someone mentioned gzip providing a good enough estimate on the compression without taking the de-duplication into account.

[keeperofdakeys]

Gzip would provide a fine-enough approximation, since both that and tarsnap use zlib. Tarsnap also has deduplication, so equal (or almost-equal) files will take up much less space.

[bosie]

is there a way to check the size of your backup without having an account?