Hi all,

Another question has come up while evaluating tarsnap. I'll be uploading from a 
MacBook in rural Colombia, with a flapping internet connection. It is a 3Mbps 
radio uplink, which is sufficiently fast to upload my 400GB 
(pre-de-duplication) data in a month or two (initial upload), BUT the 
connection is intermittent: the connection usually drops several times per 
hour, and at worst every few minutes. I've been reading about the Interrupted 
Archives, and how subsequent archive creation (with a new archive name) will 
resume a previously interrupted one. 

It seems this *might just work*, as long as I'm using a small 
`checkpoint-bytes` value and an archive name with a timestamp, except that 
every month I will have created maybe a few thousand archives. Perhaps that's 
fine, if I never need to think about the archives on a human scale, instead 
letting a script manage their creation and rotation. Obviously if I will ever 
need to use the `--list-archives` or `--recover` commands this would be insane. 

How would recoveries work, with so many archives? Let's say I discovered my 
MacBook was compromised a week ago, and I want to do a full system restoration 
to the state of the files uploaded 8 days ago. Would it be as simple as running 
extract on the last archive with the timestamp of "8 days ago", i.e., `tarsnap 
-x -f backup-YYYYMMDD.SSSSSSSSSSS /`, with the most complete and consistent 
archive found by running something like `tarsnap --list-archives | grep 
YYYYMMDD | sort | tail -1`?

Does anybody suggest that tarsnap might be the wrong tool to use under such 
circumstances?

Thank you,

Quinn

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