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

Arq, (For backups to AWS - though obviously supports every cloud back end under the sun) and &quot;Data Backup&quot; 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.<p>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 crashplan&#x2F;backblaze &quot;everything for $5&quot; come with massive caveats (like deleting backups of Hard Drives that haven&#x27;t been plugged in for 6 months - I&#x27;ve got Arq Backups of Hard Drives that I haven&#x27;t plugged in for a couple years, safe and sound) - and I&#x27;ve never had an AWS backup bill in excess of $3.00, ARQ does a wicked good job of keeping your backups on a tight budget.<p>Also - awesome win for ARQ - when I moved to Singapore, I simply added a AWS Singapore S3 Bucket and <i>wowza</i> - fast backups on my gigabit ($49&#x2F;month) link from MyRepublic. Really feel like I&#x27;m living in the future.<p>I think once I switch away from Aperture over to Photos, which presumably has a rock solid backup to iCloud photos, then simply doing a quarterly backup or so with CarbonCopyCloner + Arq to AWS + DataBackup to USB key will have my OS X backups covered.

Arq doesn&#x27;t get the publicity it deserves. It&#x27;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.<p>Most importantly, when restoring, you don&#x27;t enter your decryption password&#x2F;key into a browser window. I don&#x27;t understand how online-backup companies can talk about security while requiring users to give them their passwords in order to restore data.<p>I&#x27;ve been using Arq for about two years now and I&#x27;m very happy with it. For the reference, I have previous experience with CrashPlan and Backblaze.

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.<p>For Arq team (saw one or two here), is B2 on the roadmap?

How is this, from a technical point of view, more advanced than running rsync in a regular fashion (with hardlinks to keep cheap snapshots)?<p>Just wondering about the technical aspects.

Mirror:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;15dde3fb013581b6aa59bf0b0c3a701e" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;15dde3fb013581b6aa59bf0b0c3a701e</a>

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.<p>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.<p>Would that help if I setup versioning on the bucket? Will Arq be able to restore backups from the older version of data, before the attack takes place?<p>Any other ideas?

I would just like to point out that this is major release 5 and they&#x27;re just now adding threading and consumption of filesystem events.<p>That&#x27;s _great_ from the standpoint of launching a product. Putting off adding this complexity probably let them get to market sooner.<p>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&#x27;t know this space very well, but maybe there are several Arq-alikes who started earlier, but didn&#x27;t release until later because it wasn&#x27;t &quot;done&quot; yet, and they missed their chance.

I have nothing to add except that I&#x27;ve been a happy customer of Arq for years, and Stefan and team have provided us very helpful and personal support by email on the rare occasions when we needed it.

I&#x27;ve been using Arq for years and absolutely love it. Worth every penny. It is extremely well-built software — it&#x27;s FAST, doesn&#x27;t hog resources, and feels very polished &amp; reliable.<p>I like that I can backup to multiple destinations (AWS S3&#x2F;Glacier, Dropbox, Google Drive, even my own server via SFTP). IMO you can never have too many backups.<p>I use it along with Backblaze (and will be setting up Time Machine &amp; Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner this week, after putting it off forever).<p>Congrats to the Haystack team!

Bah, I guess hosting a site at digitalocean isn&#x27;t suitable for HN front page? Even WP super cache isn&#x27;t saving me.

Awesome, can&#x27;t wait to upgrade tonight! Any news on the Linux &#x2F; CLI version?

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).

Stefan, can you disclose how many people are working on the Arq now?<p>For some reason I always had an impression that you were impressively managing the whole thing just by yourself.

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

Google cache link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:dy3xEVo6yiwJ:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arqbackup.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;arq-5-massively-faster-backup-and-restore&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:dy3xEV...</a>

Hmm, there&#x27;s nothing on the announcement about how to upgrade your existing backups?<p>Say you have a large backup stored on S3 or Google Drive - has anybody used this, and can tell me if it upgrades it seamlessly to take advantage of the new features (e.g. LZ4 compression), or if you need to do a fresh upgrade?

I like Arq, use it as a &quot;real, offsite&quot; backup complement to Time Machine. Not quite as fire-and-forget as Time Machine, but darn close!<p>And the format of the stored data is available, which is a nice safety feature in case of major problems.

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&#x27;t seem like an <i>entirely</i> costless decision--Arq is now faster, but you should expect your storage bills to go up a bit due to the lower compression.<p>I use Borg backup with lz4 compression, so I definitely don&#x27;t think this is the <i>wrong</i> decision, just something to keep in mind (and, it does seem like something that could and maybe should be user-configurable).

Still no support for S3&#x27;s &quot;Infrequent Access&quot; storage class? It would be perfect for backups and is a good compromise between normal S3 and Glacier.

Has anyone tried both this and Crashplan? My Crashplan 10-computer subscription comes up for renewal soon so I&#x27;d be interested in people&#x27;s experiences of how they compare. Generally I&#x27;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?

It appears Arq&#x27;s being destroyed by HN currently -- I downloaded the trial for Mac, but when I press &quot;Start Trial&quot; I get &quot;Failed to create trial - A server with the specified hostname could not be found.&quot; I&#x27;ll try again tomorrow.

I 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.

I am a happy user of duplicity [1]. Discussed here [2]. Some comparison with Arq here [3]. It is more oriented towards servers and system administrators, but works pretty well and has a similar feature set.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;duplicity.nongnu.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;duplicity.nongnu.org&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6712244" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6712244</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6712411" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6712411</a>

The Mac version has gotten a lot of good response, so I tried installing the Windows version. It feels a bit like a beta sadly.<p><pre><code> - Backups to local folder do not work - Scheduled backups don&#x27;t always run until you open the GUI - Open log viewer before any backups have been performed crashes the app - File-Exit does nothing - Wizard adds whole C:\ to first destination - Doesn&#x27;t seem to backup (all) locked files </code></pre> I&#x27;ve reported all of these, and the author seems responsive, so I hope it gets better.

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&#x27;s been a perfect solution for offsite backups.

Off topic: Is anyone else getting an SSL error trying to connect? This page opens fine on my Mac (OS X 10.11.4, Safari 9.1) but my iPhone (iOS 9.3.1) asks me to trust the certificate (ssl376366.cloudflaressl.com)<p>Edit: Screenshots: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;wdfDt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;wdfDt</a><p>Also, this appears to not happen on Wi-Fi. Willing to send any information I can gleam from this -- I&#x27;d be interested to know if this is a MITM attack or a mistake on CloudFlare&#x27;s side.

Argh, the website is down...lol:<p>&quot;Error establishing a database connection&quot;

I was a user of Arq 3, but it was slow and seemed to eat up resources on my computer. I eventually turned it off, deleted the backups and deleted it. Not a great backup plan.<p>So I&#x27;m keen to know how much faster Arq 4 was, and in turn Arq 5. I&#x27;d be happy to try again (I think I&#x27;ll have to pay full price again as I&#x27;m not an Arq 4 user) - but might wait until someone can let me know just how much faster it really is.<p>This whole thread has also reminded me to run my backups to local Time Machine!

This sounds great. To my mind, it seems an approximation of Tarsnap but on Windows.<p>Is it possible to use Arq to backup to network connected disks via Windows SMB? In other words, is it necessary for me to use one of the supported cloud providers or can I just use one of my own servers as a destination? Similarly, is it possible to setup multiple redundant backup destinations (e.g., S3 and Google Drive, or S3 and my own servers)?

Didn&#x27;t JungleDisk (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jungledisk.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jungledisk.com</a>) kind of start this &quot;backup to AWS, control your own data&quot; movement? Does anyone use them anymore? I recall that they started as pay one price, then switched to a subscription model too...<p>I wound up on Crashplan, though it&#x27;s not perfect either.

One long standing issue I have with Arq is that there is no easy way to duplicate backup selections. I would love to be able to easily copy the selections between different destinations, or different systems that are being backed up.<p>Several years ago, I tried to manually edit the plist preference files, but that was painful and unsustainable hack.

Thanks for the tip. I&#x27;m checking out Arq now!<p>FWIW I&#x27;ve been a big fan of Syncovery (formerly SuperFlexible File Synchronizer) for years. It&#x27;s a Swiss Army Knife of backup&#x2F;recovery. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.syncovery.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.syncovery.com&#x2F;</a>

Been using Arq since version 2 (2010) on multiple machines. Very happy with Arq and with Stefan&#x27;s support. I use it with dual destinations for my offsite backup - about 9Tb. I also use it to provide family in another country with a viable offsite backup. Restores just work.

Any 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 &#x27;id&#x27; and &#x27;licenseKey&#x27; but neither of those are working.

As an Arq user, this makes me happy, as Arq is not exactly known for being fast.<p>The announcement doesn&#x27;t say, but I&#x27;m hoping they have reduced the amount of space needed for the client-side cache (currently 18GB (!) on my laptop).

Trying to buy my upgrade now - but it keeps telling me my Arq 4 license key is invalid.<p>I&#x27;ve tried both the licenseKey field, and the hash field from the license XML file I got when I bought Arq 4.<p>Has anybody else had success buying an upgrade license?

Can I use Arq to backup disks connected to my airport extreme router? I don&#x27;t have a desktop; will be installing it on my laptop. Can I schedule when to backup ?

been a user since arq 2. It&#x27;s the best.<p>Question to any knowledgeable folks: Why does the tool cause so much download in normal operation ? (i.e. no restoring of files)<p>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&#x27;s still next to nothing, but I found it just curious.

I guess those people with less complicated needs could use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cryptomator.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cryptomator.org&#x2F;</a> to upload the $60&#x2F;year Amazon Cloud Drive.

$50&#x2F;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?<p>edit: my bad, it&#x27;s $50 for one time purchase, not a year.

I find it a bit ironic that this particular blog has an inaccessible database at this particular time.<p>This being put aside I find their pricing a bit excessive in comparison to Backblaze for example.

This. Looks. Awesome.

&quot;Error establishing a database connection&quot;