For the better part of the last half year I’ve been working on a Graphical User Interface for the popular Tarsnap online backup service. The frontend enables desktop users to benefit from the same advantages that the Tarsnap service offers, admittedly only at the command line interface. These benefits include:
- cost effectiveness;
- flexibility and control of your backup process;
- total openness on the client side;
While the Tarsnap service is of immense efficiency and conveniency for server and scripted backups thanks to its Unix utility design, that same characteristic makes it a good choice for wrapping a desktop application with a graphical interface on top so that more users can benefit from truly secure and well designed backups as well as to easily define and use more complex backup routines from a comfortable and lean interface.
Tarsnap Setup Wizard
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Tarsnap Backup tab
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Tarsnap Archives tab
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Tarsnap Jobs tab
The application is cross platform, written in C++ with the help of the Qt SDK and is released under the BSD 2 clause license. It has been tested on OS X Yosemite, FreeBSD and most Linux distributions with a wide audience.
In the present state, the application makes it easy to:
- Configure Tarsnap on your system via a Setup Wizard;
- Make single shot backups from the Backup tab, for quickly putting some important files and directories at rest on Tarsnap;
- List, inspect and manage your backup archives from the Archives tab ;
- Define frequent backups you attend to as a job from the Jobs tab; A job has custom backup paths and settings;
- Provides useful customizations and help via the Settings and Help tabs;
The current version is 0.5. There’s so much more to be implemented and ground to cover in both usability as well as Tarsnap options breadth and depth coverage. So stay tuned for further releases and announcements to this blog, @shinn0K, @tarsnap or the tarsnap-users mail list.
Project page and source code is available at GitHub: https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui
Head over to this overview Wiki page for extra details regarding the current release. Also read the announcement e-mail on the tarsnap-users mail list.
As explained in the wiki page and the announcement e-mail, there are no binary redistributable packages for now, mainly because there aren’t any for the Tarsnap command line client either. This might change in the future though.
As with any Open Source project, I encourage you to participate via discussion, feedback, code contributions, bug reports, fixes and platform testing. Basically any type of constructive and informative contribution is very much welcomed.
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