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Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows

arqbackup.com

31–40 of 194 posts

Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows

#31
post #23
post #13

$50/year and you have to provide your own storage? Can somebody explain to me how they are competitive, i.e. in comparison with Crashplan or Backblaze? edit: my bad, it's $50 for one time purchase, not a year.

It also has no wireless.

Not sure where you see that?

On the features page, https://www.arqbackup.com/features/, under "Limit Network Impact", the image lists whether to use all wireless or no wireless.

I don't have the software so I can't confirm.

Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows

#32

Bah, I guess hosting a site at digitalocean isn't suitable for HN front page? Even WP super cache isn't saving me.

Just throw it behind CloudFlare quick, they'll cache it and you'll be set. They're pretty reputable for free speech and fighting for their customers too, so I trust them to a decent degree.

Agreed. CloudFlare is a simple way to add some caching power to a site for free. Or for a few bucks a month enable a bunch of other features.

Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows

#33
post #14

How is this, from a technical point of view, more advanced than running rsync in a regular fashion (with hardlinks to keep cheap snapshots)? Just wondering about the technical aspects.

It's also versioned backup, like Time Machine. Not just a clone of the latest.

Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows

#34
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also has no wireless.

Not sure where you see that? On the features page, https://www.arqbackup.com/features/ , under "Limit Network Impact", the image lists whether to use all wireless or no wireless. I don't have the software so I can't confirm.

It is probably a reference to the (in)famous launch review of iPod on Slashdot: https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

> No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows

#35
post #14

How is this, from a technical point of view, more advanced than running rsync in a regular fashion (with hardlinks to keep cheap snapshots)? Just wondering about the technical aspects.

One technical thing to note:

Although the application itself is not open source, the developer has open-sourced a restore tool, to help ease the "what if they go out of business" concerns:

https://github.com/sreitshamer/arq_restore

Also, somebody else has created a Go utility that can read the backup format:

https://github.com/asimihsan/arqinator

Finally, if you really wanted to do it all yourself, the data format is documented here:

http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/s3_data_format.txt

Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows

#36
I've been using Arq for years and absolutely love it. Worth every penny. It is extremely well-built software — it's FAST, doesn't hog resources, and feels very polished & reliable.

I like that I can backup to multiple destinations (AWS S3/Glacier, Dropbox, Google Drive, even my own server via SFTP). IMO you can never have too many backups.

I use it along with Backblaze (and will be setting up Time Machine & Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner this week, after putting it off forever).

Congrats to the Haystack team!

Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows

#37

Bah, I guess hosting a site at digitalocean isn't suitable for HN front page? Even WP super cache isn't saving me.

If you don't want to change your nameservers to Cloudflare (Takes up to 24 hours), try Kloudsec, and enable Offline Protection. Caches (like Cloudflare), and better, it archives your site even if your origin server is down.

For Kloudsec, all you have to do is to update your A records to point to the CDN IP.

Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows

#38
post #13

$50/year and you have to provide your own storage? Can somebody explain to me how they are competitive, i.e. in comparison with Crashplan or Backblaze? edit: my bad, it's $50 for one time purchase, not a year.

Its $50 one time purchase for new purchase. The upgrade from Arq 4 is $25. During store checkout, you can also choose to add a "Lifetime Upgrades" at $30 which will give you free upgrades for Arq 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 etc.

Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows

#39
post #14

How is this, from a technical point of view, more advanced than running rsync in a regular fashion (with hardlinks to keep cheap snapshots)? Just wondering about the technical aspects.

One differentiating factor is that rsync doesn't work with storage services like Amazon S3, Glacier, Google Drive, and the like.

Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows

#40
post #27

I find it a bit ironic that this particular blog has an inaccessible database at this particular time. This being put aside I find their pricing a bit excessive in comparison to Backblaze for example.

How much data are you backing up? The compression and deduplication seem pretty good in Arq. My monthly AWS (and now Google Nearline) bill is usually around $2, so I hit the breakeven point vs the $5/month services pretty quickly.
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