On 09/04/17 20:03, Lonnie Abelbeck wrote: > 1) Does tarsnap-keygen force unique machine-name's ? In other words if a > previously registered tarsnap.key with --machine foo and later another > "tarsnap-keygen --machine foo ..." was attempted will that fail with an > error ?
No. Machine names are purely for user convenience; you could use the same name for all of them if you want. (But if you do, you'll have trouble when you lose a key and need to ask me to delete the inaccessible data for you.) > 2) Is it best practice to create a single snapshot archive containing all > the desired files, or would creating 2 or 3 snapshot archives all at the > same time with non-overlaping scopes for organization and restore purposes > be useful ? > > It would seem 2 or 3 snapshot archives might add some extra metadata > overhead and would probably take longer to archive, but for relatively > small appliance-like systems would the organization benefit of 2 or 3 > snapshot archives ever be useful? The per-archive overhead is minimal -- on the order of 1 kB. Creating separate archives can be a good idea since it will be faster to extract a file from a small archive than from a large archive (since tarsnap has to fetch the tar archive headers and look through them to find the file you want); that only applies if you know that all the data you want to restore was part of the same archive, of course. -- Colin Percival Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid