Not on this site, but still likely to be of interest, is my Tarsnap online backup service .
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The largest recipient of this funding every year has been the FreeBSD Foundation, and to date they have received $173,920. It's hard to overstate the importance of the work the Foundation does; they provide hardware which keeps the FreeBSD project running, they fund a myriad of independent projects, and they have…
For several years leading up to this point I had been talking to Amazonians on and off about the possibility of Amazon sponsoring my FreeBSD/EC2 work; rather predictably, most of those conversation ended up with my contacts at Amazon rhyming with "Amazon should definitely sponsor the work you're doing... but I don't…
This will no doubt annoy my friends Patrick McKenzie and Thomas Ptacek , who for years have been telling me that I should raise Tarsnap's prices. But while Thomas accuses me of running Tarsnap like a public utility rather than a business, and thinks this is a characteristic to be avoided, I see this as a high…
The vulnerability — which has since been fixed, or else I would not be writing about it publicly — was in Stripe's bitcoin payment functionality . Some background for readers not familiar with this: Stripe provides payment processing services, originally for credit cards but now also supporting ACH, Apple Pay, Alipay…
While I created my AWS account because I was interested in Amazon S3, that was not in fact immediately available to me: In the early days of AWS, you had to specifically ask for each new service to be enabled for your account. My new AWS account did come with two services enabled by default, though — Amazon Simple…
There is a significant commonality between Tarsnap and Bitcoin — both rely crucially on strong cryptography, and anecdotally it seems that many Bitcoin users rely on Tarsnap to back up their "wallets" (I have no concrete data since I can't tell what data people are backing up ) — so it's not surprising that many…
To start with, there's a lot of spelling mistakes — 53, by my count. Within a few hours of my announcing the bug bounties, someone had run a spell checker against all of the comments in the Tarsnap source code and found about half of these; the rest, consisting mostly of cases where one English word was replaced by…
On the surface, Tarsnap sounds like the perfect use case for Glacier. Out of every TB of data stored on Tarsnap, in any given month approximately 100 GB of data will be deleted, while only 33 GB of data will be downloaded; in other words, Tarsnap is very much a "write once, read maybe " storage system. Tarsnap's…
At the same time, there are a lot of very interesting articles on Hacker News. Several times recently I've read a fascinating article elsewhere and submitted it to Hacker News, only to find that it had already been on Hacker News several days earlier but had been crowded out by other articles before I noticed it. This…
When the Tarsnap EC2 instance came back online about an hour later, I found that the abrupt loss of power had resulted in filesystem corruption. As I explained in a blog post in December 2008, Tarsnap stores all user data in Amazon S3, but keeps metadata cached in EC2 . While I could not see any evidence that the…
As I've blogged about before, the Tarsnap server code synthesizes a log-structured filesystem on top of Amazon S3 . As a result of this design, for each block of data stored on Tarsnap, the server code needs to keep track of two key-value pairs: First, to map a 64-bit machine number and a 256-bit block ID to a 64-bit…
This tension of what customers are asking for vs what customers really need shows up in areas like resilience. Amazon's "Well-Architected Framework" strongly exhorts customers to avoid building production workloads in a single Availability Zone — but Amazon's cross-AZ bandwidth pricing is painful, and Amazon doesn't…
I've been excited about Stripe ever since one of the founders, Patrick Collison, emailed me in 2009 to say that he was "trying to build a credit-card processor that doesn't suck". My immediate reaction: "I think that might be the most ambitious plan I've ever heard from someone associated with YC ". When Patrick went…
One of the unusual aspects of my online backup startup is that I'm a sole founder. Despite such commentary as Gabriel Weinberg's Will single founders please stand up? and Ray Grieselhuber's The Royal We: Single Founder Startups , single-founder startups are still unusual and carry with them some stigma — Paul Graham…
While I've made engineers inside Amazon aware of all of these at various times, I think it's time to post my wishlist here — both so that a wider audience inside Amazon can hear more about these, and so that the FreeBSD community (especially the people who are financially supporting my work ) can see what I'm aiming…
Four decades ago, when the Berkeley Internet Name Domain Server launched, it stored DNS records in "zone files". You could edit these files in vi , but BIND had to be told to reload them before your changes took effect. Later, other DNS servers came along, like Daniel Bernstein's tinydns, which served records directly…
Most bugs are straightforward, but occasionally one comes up which is not so clear in its impact. Such is the case with a bug which is fixed in tarsnap 1.0.36 . This bug causes the NUL string termination byte to overflow the heap-allocated buffer used for paths of objects examined as tarsnap traverses a directory…
[EDIT 2010-03-11 18:00 I mention this below, but to place my conflict up front: I'm the author of the Tarsnap secure online backup service, which is in some ways a competitor to ZumoDrive.]
One of the most common questions I receive about tarsnap is this: What guarantee can I provide that the tarsnap service will continue to operate? This is a reasonable concern; after all, with services like Omnidrive and HP Upline shutting down, what guarantee is there that tarsnap won't also shut down? Until recently…
Much of the work done by the FreeBSD Foundation is done behind the scenes, but the importance of the work they do is undeniable. They sponsor a range of important FreeBSD development which would likely not get done otherwise; in the past year this has included
Tarsnap's paranoia also extends to the client-server protocol. With most online backup services, you're lucky if they use SSL; I avoided using SSL because I wasn't satisfied with its security. Obtaining a fraudulent SSL certificate is too easy (read: possible) for an attacker, and relying on external certification…