I just went through a similar experience as described in Taylor's S4 Usability Notes for the tahoe-LAFS part in terms of managing the interfaces (both web and command line), and trying to not so much *restore* but even *find* the files that I backed up. I independently discovered this same discussion about backup vs. snapshot, and tahoe cp -r.
I now don't understand why I would ever use backup instead of cp -r, if I want to be able to navigate the files later. It also took me a long time to figure out how to get the top level directory included in the cp, by repeating the name of it after the alias.
