Reviewing Tarsnap - "Online backups for the truly paranoid"

Wondering about using Googledrive or similar stuff to store your important documents?
What if the NSA was to ask Google for your files ?
They would be forced by law to abide.
And what if we were to make your files unreadable ?
Wouldn't that be cool ?

Dedup? Deduplication

What makes Tarsnap different from its competitors is that interesting feature they call Deduplication.
What it does is, it identifies and removes duplicate blocks of data from the archives it stores.
According to the Tarsnap creators, that deduplication process is very efficient.

Out of around 96.5 GB of data, if first removes duplicate blocks to drop to around 56.1GB and then compresses it to 15.8GB.So yeah its compression ratio was 16% of its original size !! That is a massive compression which I had to test for myself (so keep reading :) ...)

So I'm posting this easy guide to Tarsnap right after testing it myself.
Before you start : Tarsnap is only available on Unix-based systems currently

1. Downloading and Installing Tarsnap

Just Download Tarsnap
https://www.tarsnap.com/download.html

Installing:

./configure in the Tarsnap directory
make
make install

 2. Configuring Tarsnap

Simply put, you need to
(a) Generate a Key
(b) Save the key somewhere safe,
(c) Create a Tarsnap account
(d) Deposit funds on your account (Got to try it for free. Thanks to Anoop Seeburuth!! )but for everyone else the minimum fund is $5 :)

 3. Pricing

Storage: 250 picodollars / byte-month($0.25 / GB-month)
Bandwidth: 250 picodollars / byte($0.25 / GB)
Its dirt cheap actually!!

4. Tarsnapping your files !

 No GUI available for the client right now.
So we'll have to go for command line to push our stuff into the clouds.
I'll name my backup testarchive for simplicity.

Upload:  tarsnap -c -f "name of your web archive" foldername/
Example: tarsnap -c -f testarchive backup/

Checking if your files were saved : tarsnap --list-archives

Restoring an archive: tarsnap -x -f "your backup name"
Example: tarsnap -x -f testarchive

Deleting your files: tarsnap -d -f "your backup name"
Example: tarsnap -d -f testarchive

My first test file was 17MB, just took some repo
My results are:Size: 17MB
Compressed Size: 6.5MB
Compression ratio: 38.2 %

Update 07/01/2016

Of course, not much duplication on video files, so we have the lowest compression ratio.
Just in case you might have a sensitive video that you'd like to keep safe from prying eyes (lol..)
Video: 730MB
Compressed Size:726
Compression Effectiveness:  <1%

Then I tried a huge list of documents , htmls,whole websites. Just threw away all the documentations i had gathered on my PC.
Total document size: 778MB
Compressed Size: 698MB
Compression Effectiveness: 10%

Testing deduplication
Added some files to my previous archive. Testing dedup.
Total document size: 1097MB
Compressed size : 842MB
Compression Effectiveness: 23% ! (well that's impressive..We're just winning on compression from adding more files)

5. My thoughts after using Tarsnap

1. Fast. I compared it to Google Drive. Less than 5 minutes difference between the two.
2. Encryption: Tarsnap actually encrypts before sending the files. (so even if the line between is insecure, they can only copy unreadable zeroes and ones.
3. Stable : Thought it would be at some beta stage. But no! Tarsnap feels very stable.
4. Cost:  Cheap. After using around 3GB, balance is $4.998276505766957172.  out of $5.

So yeah, dirt cheap secure storage for your sensitive files  >> Go TARSNAP