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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

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can do this with rsync as well, including the hardlinked-to-older file method. Have a look at the `--link-dest` option to rsync.

rsnapshot: "rsnapshot is a filesystem snapshot utility based on rsync. rsnapshot makes it easy to make periodic snapshots of local machines, and remote machines over ssh. The code makes extensive use of hard links whenever possible, to greatly reduce the disk space required."

http://rsnapshot.org

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

#112

Love arq too. Rumor has it arq 5 will also stop eating up free space with its cache.noindex folder. Excited about that!

True! It uses sqlite databases (finally). (I work at Haystack Software :)

This update is great. Very happy I bought Arq :).

I was excluding cache.noindex from my other backup system (carbon copy cloner). Is it still safe to do so?

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

#114

Awesome, got an email about an hour ago stating I received a free upgrade to 5 from my 4 license. Been using Arq for a couple years now, it's been a perfect solution for offsite backups.

We upgraded all Arq 4 purchases in the prior 90 days to Arq 5 for free. We even converted the per-computer licenses to per-user licenses, so if you bought licenses for 3 computers, you now have Arq 5 licenses for 3 users.

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

#115
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True! It uses sqlite databases (finally). (I work at Haystack Software :)

This update is great. Very happy I bought Arq :). I was excluding cache.noindex from my other backup system (carbon copy cloner). Is it still safe to do so?

Yes

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

#116
post #101

Given the rise of ransomware in the recent months, what protection does Arq offer against that? That thing alone would easily tip the scales for me versus the Time Machine. I see that the AWS S3 IAM user has both read and write access, so if the ransomware authors ever bother with it, they can kill the backups. Would that help if I setup versioning on the bucket? Will Arq be able to restore backups from the older ver…

Why would that tip the scales versus Time Machine? Time Machine should provide the same protection as Arq, i.e. versioned backups from before the ransomware attack should be safe.

I know there was some hue and cry a little while ago about Mac ransomware that can encrypt network drives and external hard drives, but there's a reason why the _encrypt_timemachine routine was an unused stub. From what I understand, Time Machine has protections built into the kernel that prevents existing backups from being modified. New backups after the ransomware attack would obviously end up backing up encrypted data, but the existing backups should remain untouched.

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

#117
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We're sending Arq 5 license codes to all lifetime purchasers. Sorry for the delay. If you don't get one today please email support@arqbackup.com.

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

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can do this with rsync as well, including the hardlinked-to-older file method. Have a look at the `--link-dest` option to rsync.

Arq is like Tarsnap/Attic/Borg in that it uses shift-resistant block deduplication - it can efficiently cope with small modifications to existing files, where rsync would have to clone the entire file for each new version.

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

#120

I would just like to point out that this is major release 5 and they're just now adding threading and consumption of filesystem events. That's _great_ from the standpoint of launching a product. Putting off adding this complexity probably let them get to market sooner. If I were releasing something like Arq, I would have to fight myself very, very hard to not add these to the 0.1 release. I don't know this space very…

But ARQ has always been fast, and figured out what it needed to backup pretty much instantly, and just did it's job and got out of the way - unlike things like spotlight/mdworker, or crashplan/backblaze, that are constantly thrashing my CPU and causing my fans to spin up.

From my uneducated perspective, having simple software that just worked was a bonus - who knows, maybe with the addition of threading, and consumption of filesystem events, ARQ is going to become crummy, and a door will be opened for someone else to write simple backup software without those features that gets the job done and doesn't bog up your computer. I guess we'll have to try Arq 5 for a few weeks to find out. Fingers Crossed.

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