It appears Arq's being destroyed by HN currently -- I downloaded the trial for Mac, but when I press "Start Trial" I get "Failed to create trial - A server with the specified hostname could not be found." I'll try again tomorrow.
Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
51–60 of 194 posts
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#52Still no support for S3's "Infrequent Access" storage class? It would be perfect for backups and is a good compromise between normal S3 and Glacier.
It does support that: http://i.imgur.com/EC1e83h.jpg .
Great! It should have been mentioned in the announcement because I've been waiting for this option a long time.
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#53Arq, (For backups to AWS - though obviously supports every cloud back end under the sun) and "Data Backup" by ProSoft engineering (For backups to USB) are my goto backup tools for day-day ensuring all my work documents are kept up to date. Yes, I have Crashplan (for the last couple years, backblaze for the three years before that) - but the constant chewing up of CPU cycles gets annoying after a while. And both crash…
like deleting backups of Hard Drives that haven't been plugged in for 6 months
Wait - what?
If your hard disk gets lost or destroyed, how do you protect those backups?
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My current backup is around 300 Gigs. I see the big advantage of Arq (over Backblaze) is the fact that you can choose your host. However their own hosting solution for $10/mo with a 250GB data cap is quite expensive. I can see that for smaller amounts of data Arq is more interesting, especially since it also stores history (which Backblaze does not).
It's worth noting that Arq can back up to Amazon Cloud Drive, which offers unlimited storage for $59.99 a year. As soon as they offered that I switched from Glacier storage; Cloud Driver is faster, cheaper and less fiddly.
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#55What compression was used before Arq 5? lz4 is super fast, but not particularly space-efficient compared to some slower compression algorithms. Since Arq customers are the ones paying the storage bills, this doesn't seem like an entirely costless decision--Arq is now faster, but you should expect your storage bills to go up a bit due to the lower compression.
I use Borg backup with lz4 compression, so I definitely don't think this is the wrong decision, just something to keep in mind (and, it does seem like something that could and maybe should be user-configurable).
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#56I use Arq to backup all my stuff hourly to my NAS at home through SFTP and the NAS then backups the most important stuff to AWS daily. That works really well and keeps the cost really low because i need the NAS anyway for streaming media an such.
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#57How 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.
which is a good thing.
if a few years ago somebody said "just copy all your private data to some place on the internet... but encrypt it first" you would take it for the crazy argument it is.
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#58Arq, (For backups to AWS - though obviously supports every cloud back end under the sun) and "Data Backup" by ProSoft engineering (For backups to USB) are my goto backup tools for day-day ensuring all my work documents are kept up to date. Yes, I have Crashplan (for the last couple years, backblaze for the three years before that) - but the constant chewing up of CPU cycles gets annoying after a while. And both crash…
like deleting backups of Hard Drives that haven't been plugged in for 6 months Wait - what? If your hard disk gets lost or destroyed, how do you protect those backups?
You need to keep them connected periodically otherwise if you lose it without reconnecting... lost.
For backblaze it's even less time.
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#59If I understand well, Arq does not backup the whole computer. I am looking for a tool that allows for recovery of single files, but also that has a backup of the whole machine, so that if the HD crashes it is possible to rebuild it verbatim. What does HN suggest for such a tool? I used Norton Ghost for years (but it has been discontinued).
for disk deaths I'd just settle with raid. life should be simple.
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#60How 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…
It needs updating for Arq 5. I'm working on right now.