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

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

#71

Post by LVB »

yoz-y wrote: post #46
LVB wrote: post #40

Earlier 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).

I didn't even know they offered that until now. I viewed the prime advantage of Arq was selecting your host. And really that is "hosts", since you can have multiple backup sets and different hosts. Stuff that I often want to retrieve I might have on Google Drive as well as one of the "cold storage" options.

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

#72

Post by skrause »

CameronBanga wrote: post #42

Been an Arq user for years now, and recommend it to anyone. Love being able to choose my own storage solution, control encryption keys, etc. For Arq team (saw one or two here), is B2 on the roadmap?

Arq's author has said on Twitter that the B2 API doesn't support all commands Arq needs, so even if B2 support was planned (which it isn't) it wouldn't be possible yet: https://twitter.com/arqbackup/status/717756616578301952

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

#73

Post by falcolas »

sneak wrote: post #18
sreitshamer wrote: post #10

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

Stop using wordpress.

At a minimum, add some caching in front of WordPress. Even a 1 minute cache of pages will result in being able to host your WordPress site just about anywhere. Throw in a CDN, and you could almost host it on a Raspberry Pi and throw Reddit at it.

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

#74

Post by mobiuscog »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #54
yoz-y wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the pricing is great for the US... not so good for the rest of the world (for example: https://www.amazon.co.uk/clouddrive/pricing?ref_=cd_home_pla...)

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

#75

Post by Jenkins2000 »

jaxondu wrote: post #38
krzrak wrote: 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.

I purchased the Lifetime Upgrades in September 2015. Now it tells me there is a $25 upgrade fee to go to version 5. I emailed support a few hours ago to confirm. If this is true, I am extremely disappointed and feel cheated. Notice on the form to buy a new license it doesn't say anything about "Lifetime Upgrades for this major version _only_ which will be obsolete in a few months". I sure hope this is just a bug that they will fix.

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

#76

Post by lobster_johnson »

enoch_r wrote: post #55

What 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 do…

I'm also curious about the choice of LZ4. It's fast, but its compression is pretty awful.

For example, on simple, regular text (JSON) files I'm seeing about 45% worse compression than plain gzip (default compression level). I hope at least it's using the highest compression level, but I've found that "lz4 -9" is about as slow as "gzip -6", still with worse compression.

I'd be happier if the choice of compression was dependent on the size of files. The larger a file, the more you gain from compression.

Does Arq skip compression for already-compressed files (.gz, .xz, .bz2 etc.)?

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

#77

Post by jmnicolas »

blue1 wrote: post #15

If 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).

Windows 7 has this included. They discontinued it for 8 and 10, I guess it was harming the backup market.

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

#78

Post by kaypro »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #69
sreitshamer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry about that. Should work now.

Thanks. I now get to the store, but it gets a 500 Internal Error trying to verify my key. Also, the Purchase link does embed my Arq 4 license key, but in the form, the upgrade license key field is empty, and I have to find it from my old .arqLicense file and paste it. I don't even know if I'm copying the right thing.

Same here. Let me know if you figure this out. I'll do the same. I just shot Stefan an email but I'm sure he's inundated at the moment...

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

#79

Post by leejoramo »

blue1 wrote: post #15

If 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).

In addition to SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner there is ChronoSync.

http://www.econtechnologies.com/chronosync/overview.html

SuperDuper is the easiest to use, and I would recommend it to anyone as their first choice.

CCC and ChronoSync both have more advanced features: including bootable network copies, and backing the recovery partitions.

ChronoSync also offers two-way folder sync's, enterprise features, and more.

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

#80

Post by wrboyce »

gcb0 wrote: post #59
blue1 wrote: post #15

If 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.

Not always feasible (laptops, macs).
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