| 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. |
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).