After posting how great Tarsnap is I thought it only fair to write a ‘how to install Tarnsap on Linux’ article, so here goes.
Sign up for an account
This is the easiest part, simply create an account at Tarsnap.com and verify your e-mail address. You will need to ‘top up’ your account with at least 5 American Pasos to actually get started so may as well do that right away. I used Paypal as it makes me feel safe and when I feel safe I sleep better at night.
Once you have an account balance there’s actually not much else to do via the website; the rest is all command line goodness.
Download and Compile the Source Code
I’m going to do the rest as the ‘root’ user. If you’re not feeling as brave you may wish to prefix every command with ‘sudo’ as your normal user – for some reason Ubuntu et al seem to love doing this.
At the time of writing version 1.0.36.1 was the latest.
First up lets get root and change to /tmp and then download the tarball:
sudo -i cd /tmp/ wget https://www.tarsnap.com/download/tarsnap-autoconf-1.0.36.1.tgz
