Greetings from the pit, I hope all your data from 2015 is safe and sound and that you're looking at 2016 with less worry of that kind than in previous years. And what better way to celebrate that feat than with a new mint of Tarsnap GUI. Version 0.8 is fresh out of the forge: https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/releases/tag/v0.8
This release continues on the track already paved by the previous release in terms of performance, code robustness and adherence to modern C++ practices and UI consistency, adds a bunch of new features like simulation mode, skip files flagged nodump in the file system and a persistent Journal, as well as numerous other improvements, fixes and adjustments throughout the whole spectrum. This release makes Tarsnap GUI leaner, faster and more robust overall. Full change log brought forward by this release: https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/blob/v0.8/CHANGELOG Let's dive into some juicy details next: 1. The OS X Homebrew recipe has been updated and is now the preferred method of installation for this platform. In addition the Formula has been submitted to the upstream repo, although chances of it being accepted are small given the no GUI general rule, although this particular app has some utility even without having to use the UI daily: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/48511 Accepted or not, installing the latest version on OS X remains as simple as: $brew install -v https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/master/util/tarsnap-gui.rb && brew linkapps tarsnap-gui 2. This release features a Simulation mode. In addition to the description in the CHANGELOG, I'd like to mention that general overall tarsnap stats are not being updated while in this mode. Thus if you create several archives while in Simulation mode, you can't expect their stats to cumulate and have a metric for days of usage under Simulate. While this would have been cool to have, this can't be done without actually uploading deduplicated chunks to the server or talking with the server at all. At the moment, the biggest utility for Simulate remains for evaluating single archives. Maybe this will turn out into something more useful down the road. 3. As mentioned in the previous release, the code underwent a major refactoring and cleanup, which is mostly done. The code is leaner, faster and more robust as a result of that. Part of this was accomplished by adopting some C++11/14 and some Qt 5 goodness and part with the help good tooling. If you experience trouble when building or at runtime, don't hesitate to report, though in my testing nothing has changed but for the good. 4. The other pleasant surprises in this release are the persistent Journal and storing archive contents as compressed blobs. Keeping a log of backup actions and being able to review it at any time is a must for any backup practice. The Journal serves that purpose now and is populated while in headless mode too. On the latter, as you probably know already, archive contents are fetched and cached when inspecting an archive. Up until now that the app stored plain text listing in the local Sqlite DB cache. For big archives with many hundreds of thousands of files (not that uncommon at all) handling and storing all that text is going to be a performance and resource drag. Starting with this version, the archive contents are stored as compressed zlib blobs and only decompressed when needed for display. This has a significant positive impact on the app's performance and resource usage. 5. There is no caveat when upgrading from v0.7. Everything should go smooth as silk. This release is the best offering to date and thus I strongly encourage everyone to upgrade and follow back with feedback be it either positive or negative. As always, I'm welcome to new ideas or CLI options coverage requests. Cheers, Shinnok
