I think the fact that Colin handles everything himself increases my trust in tarsnap, because he clearly knows what he is doing. I trust it in a way that I would not trust a faceless corporation like crashplan, even though they also advertise client-side encryption.

I have a secondary emergency backup in a bank vault, so even in the unlikely event that tarsnap were to crash and burn at the same time my disk fails, I still have another backup, it's just 1-2 months old.

Honestly, I'm not sure I would be a tarsnap customer if it were a larger operation where I could not gauge the trustworthiness and skill of all the involved parties.