End of an Era: Archiving Tapestry
Last Updated: 2024-01-04 05:00:00 -0600
Tapestry is the oldest code project of mine that can be said to fall under the Arcana Labs umbrella - in fact, it’s so old that the project itself has persisted through two full rebrands and renamings of the lab - Kensho Security Labs, and Patch Savage Labs before that. While I’m sure I’m now its only continuous user, the fact remains it is, at least for me, a profoundly useful backup utility… when it works… and sadly, it no longer works.
Just two weeks ago I posted about a pretty major performance imparement. I’m not going to pretend I spent the full two week period thinking about the issue, given the intervening holidays, but I have had enough time to come up with a major decision: I won’t be fixing it.
Tapestry has had a really good run, for my first “serious” software project. But the real takeaway here is that there are better tools for doing the same basic job (backing up my files securely onto, untrusted media) that are better suited for my exact use case and purposes than Tapestry itself could be. I could spend another year massaging Tapestry into a more appropriate shape for my specific use case, but that’s not an attractive prospect.
I want to thank the people over the years who have contributed code, ideas, or served as proxy rubber ducks for this project. I also want to encourage people who were considering using Tapestry to instead consider alternatives. Personally at the moment I’m looking at the FOSS project Restic since it appears to do the majority of what I want it to straight out of the box.
As always, watch this space. There’s plenty in the pipeline for the year that giving up Tapestry as a project won’t make any impact to at all.
If you wanted to show your support financially for Arcana Labs projects like Piminder or PETI, but don’t need a virtual pet development kit, your best avenue is via my Github Sponsors account or by making a one-time donation to Arcana Labs via Ko-Fi.com or through other avenues detailed here.