I’ve been using Arq to back up two computers since CrashPlan Home ended in 2018. I have a lifetime Arq license for the software, and bring my own storage.
I’ve been using Wasabi Unlimited Egress (now called Wasabi Pay as You Go) S3-compatible storage. It used to be a good deal: $4.99 per TB per month, with no other charges*.
But there have been several price increases:
2018: $4.99/TB/month
2018 later: $5.99
2023: $6.99
2026: $7.99
At this rate they’ll be $10/TB in five years.
So I’m looking to move to a different storage provider. Right now I have 4.1 TB in Wasabi, but I put a budget in Arq to keep the cost down. Let’s say I would be storing up to 5 TB. I’m using Time Machine-style thinning.
Do any Arq users have suggestions? Has anyone tried a bulk data move from one S3 storage provider to another?
Right now the leading candidates are:
iDrive e2
Mega S4
* There used to be a 90 day minimum storage charge for objects, but it vanished from the invoice in March. It was only about 50 cents though.
Like you, I moved to Arq when CrashPlan stopped wanting home users.
For near S3 compatible, include Backblaze B2.
I am using Google Drive (Google One) with 2 TB. For 5 TB plan it is about AUD 5.50 per TB (paid annually) - say about USD 3.5 to 4 per TB.
Apart from price, I am using Google Drive because performance (upload/download speed) is much better than Wasabi, Backblaze B2, etc. I assume this is because Google uses servers in Australia.
I use Google Cloud Archive with Arq. I use it with my Photos and some other things that are important to me in case of disaster. As far as I remember I will need to wait for some minutes from starting download before it will begin. Luckily never needed to do it. It is very cheap as long as you do not need to download. But if disaster struck it would probably be covered by insurance. I pay $3.20 for 2.02 TiB. I asked Claude: My cost is $3.20 for 2.02 TiB. what is that in $/TB? Claude: “Let’s work through it:
So your rate works out to about $1.44 per TB per month.
For comparison, that’s slightly above the standard US Archive rate of ~$1.23/TB-month which lines up with what you’d expect, since Sweden (europe-north1) typically runs a bit higher than US regional pricing.”
(I use Arq with B2, plus a local networked machine backup of a subset of my data.)
Just on the bulk data move question: I’m not sure I’d bother.
Add the new destination, run both until at least one generation of backup is complete before you stop the old one, and when you think you’ve got enough “history” there, remove the old one.
Yes, there’s a short period where you’re paying double, but it’ll be a lot less time (and probably money) spent dealing with it.
Last week I migrated the MacBook Pro backup from Wasabi to MEGA S4 using rclone, and then adopted the new storage location in Arq. In a few weeks I’ll do the same for the iMac, and then I’m done with Wasabi.
For testing, I signed up for one month at 3 TB (“Pro I”), for €9.99. I was billed $11.57.
In a few weeks I plan to upgrade to 10 TB (“Pro II”) for €16.67/month, charged yearly = €200 = $231.48/year, or $19.29/month. There are no taxes, unlike Wasabi.
So, it works out to $1.93 per TB per month. But since I only plan to have 4-5 TB, the effective rate for me is $3.86 - $4.82 per TB per month.
There’s a problem with my plan. Looking closer at the MEGA pricing, it may be that only some of the “Pro” plans include object storage. From what it says…
Looking at the relative pricing and likely “Pro” users, this seems very odd. I can’t find a place where the web site says “No” for Pro II & III, it just doesn’t say “yes”. Suggest you ask MEGA.
Turns out I was right before, and right now: MEGA says that they recently changed which plans are eligible for MEGA S4 (S3 compatible) object storage. Pro II and Pro III plans are no longer eligible for S4 activations. But users with existing S4 are grandfathered in.
For anyone doing a repository move like this, you can leave Arq updating the source repository while it is cloning. That helps because it takes days to move 4 TB of objects.
This is a dirty copy, of course, and will get some errors while cloning. So what you do is…
rclone copy (while Arq is up)
Stop Arq automatic backups
rclone sync (to update the clone, fixing the differences)
