Stefan, can you disclose how many people are working on the Arq now?
For some reason I always had an impression that you were impressively managing the whole thing just by yourself.
Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
121–130 of 194 posts
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#122Has anyone tried both this and Crashplan? My Crashplan 10-computer subscription comes up for renewal soon so I'd be interested in people's experiences of how they compare. Generally I've found Crashplan to be pretty good. I like the way it backs up in frequent small increments and I like the backup destination options (cloud, folder, other PC, etc.). Does Arq compare well?
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#123If 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).
Veeam Endpoint Backup Free [1] is Windows only but can do incremental file level and volume backups.
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It took 3 years of disconnection before I got a notice the other day that one of my old backed up PCs was going to be deleted. It makes sense; they're not an open-ended data archival company. If you don't have a copy of the data locally, you can't expect CrashPlan to keep the one true copy indefinitely. Connecting the data to the internet twice a year doesn't seem too onerous to show evidence of that, particularly fo…
Absolutely agree with you - I think CrashPlan/BackBlaze are acting entirely reasonably when they delete old hard drives, particularly if they give a bit of grace after sending the email that they are about to nuke them.
It's that just for some of us, who like to archive something like a 100 GB Hard Drive onto Amazon Glacier, for $0.007/GB/Month. (Roughly $0.70/month + $5 upload fees for a 100 GB Hard Drive Archive) - and just leave it there, presumably for decades, are better served by Arq + Glacier than we are by CrashPlan/BackBlaze - they are entirely different tools for different purposes.
On the Flip Side, backing up users two 5+ Terabyte Hard Drives on S3 with Arq gets a little pricey... How crashplan/backblaze manage to do it for $5 is beyond me. Presumably it's because most its users are sending in < 100 Gigabytes (after deduping)
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#125Any of you know how to get your license code for an upgrade? I have the original email from when I bought Arq 4 in 2014, and it contains a license file. This is an XML with sections like 'id' and 'licenseKey' but neither of those are working.
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#126Didn't JungleDisk (http://jungledisk.com) kind of start this "backup to AWS, control your own data" movement? Does anyone use them anymore? I recall that they started as pay one price, then switched to a subscription model too...
I wound up on Crashplan, though it's not perfect either.
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#127Arq doesn't get the publicity it deserves. It's a reliable, provider-independent backup solution that YOU control. Data gets encrypted locally, then sent over to storage providers. When new storage providers appear, Arq implements APIs and lets you use them. Most importantly, when restoring, you don't enter your decryption password/key into a browser window. I don't understand how online-backup companies can talk abo…
I second this! Have used Arq for several years, it works great. Happy to see performance improvements!
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took 3 years of disconnection before I got a notice the other day that one of my old backed up PCs was going to be deleted. It makes sense; they're not an open-ended data archival company. If you don't have a copy of the data locally, you can't expect CrashPlan to keep the one true copy indefinitely. Connecting the data to the internet twice a year doesn't seem too onerous to show evidence of that, particularly fo…
Absolutely agree with you - I think CrashPlan/BackBlaze are acting entirely reasonably when they delete old hard drives, particularly if they give a bit of grace after sending the email that they are about to nuke them. It's that just for some of us, who like to archive something like a 100 GB Hard Drive onto Amazon Glacier, for $0.007/GB/Month. (Roughly $0.70/month + $5 upload fees for a 100 GB Hard Drive Archive) -…
Yev from Backblaze here -> Absolutely. They key difference is backup vs. archive. Backblaze was designed as a backup solution, it's intended to be a 1:1 copy of your user data, and if your data set changes we change it on our end as well, with a 30-day history for accidental deletes. We need to reclaim that space to keep costs down, and we're not intended nor designed to be an archive (keeping data forever).
Backblaze B2 is designed differently and can be used as an archival system. The philosophies are different, but one of the reasons that we created it was to give folks the option of making actual archives they could keep in the cloud.
We hit the $5/month price-point by having our own server design, and by reclaiming space on occasion when data sets are removed. On the B2 side, since you're paying per GB, we can afford to keep that data for longer stretches. Hopefully Arq will integrate with B2 in the future and you'd be able to use their system to pick and choose what you want archived and have B2 as a possible repository.
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#129Thanks for the tip. I'm checking out Arq now! FWIW I've been a big fan of Syncovery (formerly SuperFlexible File Synchronizer) for years. It's a Swiss Army Knife of backup/recovery. https://www.syncovery.com/
Syncovery looks pretty awesome for what it does, I just installed it to take a look, - Directory Synchronizaton - but it's achilles heel for file backups (as opposed to directory/disk cloning) - is appears to be it's lack of any type of versioning. I.E. If I make changes to a file each day, and do backups each day - no way to go back to a version of the file a couple weeks ago?
Re: Arq 5: Massively faster backup and restore for Mac and Windows
#130If 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).
What OS? Windows, OSX, Linux, or...?
On Windows, my favorite by far is ShadowProtect. It's actually a sector-by-sector backup that pretends to be a file-by-file backup when you restore a file.
What's great about this is when you modify a huge file, it only backs up the actual sectors you changed. (Most Windows backup programs detect changes on a file-by-file basis.) I have it set to run a full incremental backup every 15 minutes; the backup typically takes 15-30 seconds and is unnoticeable when it happens.
Even though it's a sector backup, you can still restore specific files or do a complete system recovery, either to the same/compatible device or with a Hardware Independent Restore to different hardware. I've done each of these many times.
On OSX, I'm using Time Machine, but I wish there were something as good as ShadowProtect. It is a bummer when I touch a few sectors in a huge file like a VM disk image, and the best Time Machine can do is back up the entire file again.