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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

#181

Post by yoz-y »

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.

That is quite good! Unfortunately, in France there is no Unlimited Everything plan. The prices are similar to the UK (comment from mobiuscog).

However there is one last quirk I have with Arq + Hosting Service. If you need to retrieve your backup _fast_ you will have to reach for a paid service such as AWS Snowball which seems quite expensive. I can't to seem to find more recent information about them shipping smaller disks, just some old articles.

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

#182

Post by lobster_johnson »

sreitshamer wrote: post #62
lobster_johnson wrote: post #44

As an Arq user, this makes me happy, as Arq is not exactly known for being fast. The announcement doesn't say, but I'm hoping they have reduced the amount of space needed for the client-side cache (currently 18GB (!) on my laptop).

Yes. I just added that to the announcement post. It stores stuff in sqlite databases that are a lot smaller.

It went from 18GB to 600MB! That's awesome, thanks!

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

#183

Post by overcast »

sreitshamer wrote: post #114
overcast wrote: post #109

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.

Fantastic!

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

#184

Post by DenisM »

greggman wrote: post #171
DenisM wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't answer my question at all.

what part of that didn't you understand? Yes arq will protect you from ransomware. Time Machine will not. both backup differences only. So with arq you just pick a backup before everything was encrypted. With Time Machine the problem is your hard drive is on the same machine that's been infected so that hard drive will be encrypted as well. Arq doesn't have that problem since the data is in the cloud. The ransomeware…

> that is until there is ransomware that checks for arq and tells it to delete all your cloud data :(

Well, yes, and that is exactly what I wrote in my original post:

[...] 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. [...]

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

#185

Post by DenisM »

eridius wrote: post #156
DenisM wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it should, but does it? Time Capsule's drive is just another network drive. The data could be easily erased. There's also a button in the Airport Utility that nukes all data on the drive. There is no reason for me to believe that this button could not be triggered by rouge software. It would be nice if you could provide citations to the opposite.

It's not "just another network drive". It's mounted specially by the OS. Sure, if you mount the drive like a normal network drive then the protections might be lost (but maybe not; it's plausible that the protection takes the form of an xattr that prevents modification, so mounting it using any mechanism that respects xattrs might preserve the same protection. I'm not at home right now or I'd check up on that). But y…

>if you're talking about theoretical attacks where the software figures out how to actively mount a network drive that isn't already mounted in order to wreck it, then you may as well speculate about it figuring out how to delete data from your Amazon S3 bucket

Yeah, and that is precisely where I started my question. To quote (from the post you have replied to):

[...] 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. [...]

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

#186

Post by eridius »

DenisM wrote: post #185
eridius wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "just another network drive". It's mounted specially by the OS. Sure, if you mount the drive like a normal network drive then the protections might be lost (but maybe not; it's plausible that the protection takes the form of an xattr that prevents modification, so mounting it using any mechanism that respects xattrs might preserve the same protection. I'm not at home right now or I'd check up on that). But y…

>if you're talking about theoretical attacks where the software figures out how to actively mount a network drive that isn't already mounted in order to wreck it, then you may as well speculate about it figuring out how to delete data from your Amazon S3 bucket Yeah, and that is precisely where I started my question. To quote (from the post you have replied to): [...] I see that the AWS S3 IAM user has both read and…

Oh so you did. I had forgotten.

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

#187

Post by nowbacktowork »

philsnow wrote: post #103

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…

For me personally having a history in this space these are two 1.0 features if releasing today. Back when they released 1.0 it might not have been obvious that these features were needed to differentiate.

But getting the single threaded path solid before adding parallelism is a good choice.

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

#188

Post by frankhofmann »

been a user since arq 2. It's the best.

Question to any knowledgeable folks: Why does the tool cause so much download in normal operation ? (i.e. no restoring of files)

I have about 60gb backed up at rest, and am on a backup-every-2h-cycle. I generate about 6 GB of download traffic each month. So funnily enough, the traffic costs me more than the actual storage :) mind you it's still next to nothing, but I found it just curious.

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

#189

Post by gcb0 »

reiichiroh wrote: post #154
gcb0 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for disk deaths I'd just settle with raid. life should be simple.

raid isn't for backup. it's for uptime.

what i suggest was not for back up, it's for disk death. it was a one line comment...

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

#190

Post by gcb0 »

wrboyce wrote: post #80
gcb0 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for disk deaths I'd just settle with raid. life should be simple.

Not always feasible (laptops, macs).

my netbook from 2003 accepts two ssd (Asus eeepc 1000). you should stop getting work equipment because of looks or peer pressure.
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