[NhanH]

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).

[stephenr]

Plugging together?

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?