I was checking the cloud options at the Arq site, and discovered that they now have an all-in-one service that includes cloud storage:
https://www.arqbackup.com/arqcloudbackup/
Mac only for now, $60 per year for 1TB, additional space TBs is $72/year/TB, which is comparable with Backblaze B2 for the first TB, and somewhat more for additional if you need it. Unlike Backblaze backup, it will backup networked drives, which is essential for me.
Has anyone tried it yet?
I havenāt tried it but their bring-your-own-storage backup software, Arq Backup, is well thought of. Arq Cloud could be a good alternative to Backblaze and successor to the discontinued consumer CrashPlan service. Over time, itās probably cheaper, but more complex, to buy Arq Backup for $50 and use it with Wasabi or Backblaze B2, especially if you need more than 1TB (including versioning).
They tout their speed, saying ārestore is so fast youāll get your files back before other backup services can populate a hard drive and mail it to you.ā Thatās nice but when recovering from the total loss of a local drive, a lot of people would still be better off with a shipped hard drive due to their ISPās performance.
Curtis Wilcox wrote: āThey tout their speed, saying ārestore is so fast youāll get your files back before other backup services can populate a hard drive and mail it to you.ā Thatās nice but when recovering from the total loss of a local drive, a lot of people would still be better off with a shipped hard drive due to their ISPās performance.ā
This would certainly be a problem when itās a primary or even secondary backup. For me (even with slow DSL) itās less of an issue, since the online backup is the last-resort regional disaster backup. It will take the pacific northwet at least a few months to even partially recover from a big earthquake. In that scenario, having a backup mailed wouldnāt help anyway. I have hard drives off site for lesser disasters though they donāt get rotated as often as they should, and Iām starting to collect the most critical stuff such as house papers onto SD cards so I can keep them in the go bags, and maybe a frequently updated one in my pocket.
Iāve installed Arq Cloud Backup in trial mode and itās chugging away. It couldnāt see my shared drives, even if I turned on SMB. (I use AFP since itās about 20% faster than SMB.) Arq insists on a UNC path, which seems to be a windows thing. This is odd in a program thatās aimed at end users and is only available for Macs so far. I was able to work around it by running it on my server (2011 mini) as well as on my primary mac since it doesnāt limit the number of computers you connect from. But it would be nice to have it in one place to make it easier to keep an eye on it. It installs a menubar widget so you can see how itās doing even with the app closed, which is nice.
Itās using Wasabi for the cloud storage. If you open the advance options when you set up an account, you can choose between Eastern US servers or Western US servers which is great, since I want the backup to be completely out of region. This was one reason why I dithered into inactivity about whether to use B2. Theyāre in northeast CA, which while better than most of the left coast, is still not far enough from plate tectonics effects to make me happy.
Also in the Advanced settings, you can set a separate encryption password. Once set, itās set for all computers that use the account. Presumably theyāre using a hash for that. By default, they use the account password as the encryption password so they can reset it for you (or let a nation state bludgeon them into resetting it so they can get access.) Thereās no option for two factor auth, so you really should use the separate encrypt password, which would limit any malicious damage to denial of service by wiping out the files.
File selection is awkward compared to Crashplan or most Mac backup software. You have to explicitly exclude files/folders by path (which fortunately can be done in bulk in an Open dialog with command-click selection) or add filters (only simple ones based on path/file names). Then if you go into Exclude again, it only shows the folders that are being backed up. If you want to re-include something, you have to scroll through a list of explicit path names and filters (many of which are defaults in the app) and subtract them, then possibly go back into exclude to re-exclude some of the subfolders. It took me a few tries to be sure of what it was doing, and many of my users would be confused and need a lot of hand holding, unless they just use the defaults (which could be ok for most people).
My main computer has finished itās backup, which is unsurprising since I only needed it to do the desktop. Everything else gets saved to a shared disk. The server backup is currently set to backup about 45 GB (Iām trying to start with the most important things), and I estimate it will take at best 6 days. I think if I used the full Arq, thereād be a way to upload most of it over a faster connection then adopt that to the real situation, but I never got around to testing it.
Once I have more files up there, Iāll try out the built in restore. Superficially it looks OK. From any computer running Arq, you can see all of the files in the account, no matter which computer is doing the uploads. I doubt it has as many nice options as Crashplan about where to save them though. Thereās nothing in the help files about restore at all. You can also get at the files via the web if you need a few while out and about, which could be handy.
Barring any serious problems during the trial, Iāll probably keep on with this. Itās somewhat more expensive and has fewer features than the full arq + choose your own cloud, but the convenience and bypassing of my procrastinational tendencies would actually get things backed up (instead of just thought about).
So Iāve been using Arq with both offsite B2 and with onsite to my own storage (e.g,I use SFTP to a local server to do the equivalent of networked Time Machine, except Iād say far more reliable.) I expect that the new storage plan is the same when it comes to restores - when you restore files, it asks if you want to overwrite or not. If you chose not to overwrite, it creates a folder called āRestored by Arqā in the original location with the folder structure retained within that folder. It works for me. (Iām storing about 800 GB across three computers to B2, so Iām paying a bit less the $60/year, although I also paid to license the app.)
Restore is indeed somewhat flexible. I restored two files to a new folder, and it did it as expected; it included the entire folder path to them, which is ok, though it a few circumstances it could be annoying.
I had to remove ACB from my file server. It didnāt seem able to cope with complex file selections and/or many large drives even if it wasnāt supposed to look at them. Twice it lost track of what it was supposed to do and thought it had finished; the only way to restart a batch was to unselect the whole batch then set it up again, which caused it to delete what was already backed up from the cloud. It also was tying up resources even when not actively backing up (maybe trying to analyze all the disks for deduplication?), and since I had to do some other high intensity things over the weekend, it all bogged down and I uninstalled it completely.
I left the copy on my primary mac where things are much simpler (just most of the User folder), and thatās going better, though at this point I donāt really trust it. There is one reproducible bugāif I dismount a drive, even one that isnāt included in the backup set, it causes the backup to stop. That seems to be what triggered the trouble on the server. The iMac is restarting it without problems so far.
I sent a long report in to Arq, so maybe there are fixes for some of it. Itās only been out for a few months, so I expect itās just teething problems and maybe not enough testing on slow connections with huge amounts of files that over-stress the exclusion-based file section.
I like the real Arq much better in any case. File selection is sane instead of a train wreck, and the extra features will almost certainly be useful (multiple destinations and backup sets, adoption.) So itās back to procrastinating the decision of which cloud to useā¦
Unfortunately I had to give up completely on Arq Cloud Backup. Itās not ready for primetime, at least for me. I gave up on it on my fileserver pretty quickly because ACB gets a D- at selecting what you want to backup or not backup. I hoped that if I limited it to my main system boot drive, it could at least manage that cleanly. And it did, until I added my Aperture library which is the primary thing that needs to be backed up. In about 9 days, it managed to transfer 2.5 GB out of 100 GB of it. At some point it just stalled, and was only sending out a few bites every couple of minutes. The developer never replied to the report I sent about the problems I was having (I didnāt really expect a reply, itās a small shop). I expect that it will eventually be a good choice for many people, but for now Iād call it a beta release. Itās certainly worth trying out, but keep a close eye on it throughout the demo period (and after) to make sure itās doing what it should.
I played more with a full Arq demo at work, and itās so much nicer. Sane file selection so itās easy to prioritize what gets backed up on a slow connection and gradually add to it. Multiple backup sets and other useful features. I wish it could select files based on modification dates and other metadata, but I can live with file paths as long as I can see the hierarchy as I select things.
Now Iām back to the āwhich cloud?ā choice. B2 simply isnāt far enough away from my primary disaster scenario - major PNW earthquake or volcano. Wasabi has a choice of server locations - west coast, east coast, europe. They clone the Amazon S3 model, so many clients work easily with it, and the wasabi help is fairly good so far. Iāve been playing with the 30 day demo, and on the whole I think Iāll stick with it though there have been a couple of minor issues.
Upload though the web interface was unreliable at best. As my first test, I told it to to copy a folder with eight linux installer isos, 17GB total. The transfer hung after 5 minutes, and I couldnāt find a way to cleanly cancel the operation.
I downloaded their own Mac client. Did Show Package Contents, peeked at the Frameworks, discovered that it uses osxfuse, and tossed it. Iāve never had Fuse not cause weird problems on a working system.
I downloaded a demo of ExpanDrive (no fuse!), used a Wasabi help file to get it connected, and that worked great. The linux folder got there in about 8 minutes over a GB connection, and I threw a bunch of other things at it with no trouble.
One of the things Iāve discovered I like a lot about the Arq / other cloud client model is that Iāve figured out how to quick start my backup so it doesnāt take a year to get it all up there. If I segregate older unchanging files, I can back those up with Arq to a hard drive, which gives me the encryption, compression and deduplication, then take the drive to a fast connection and upload the backup to the cloud with any third party client. I could probably do the entire backup that way, then have Arq adopt it, but Iād have to test that a lot first; the separation/archive seems less fraught.
Having a nice generic cloud available also opens up having my own fully encrypted cloud service, at least for the desktops. Something like Panicās Transmit, or CyberDuck + Cryptomator. iOS options for connecting to S3 seem to be nil just now, but I luckily bought iOS Transmit when it was still available, so in principle that ought to all work until the app breaks. The web interface also might work better with smaller files, but it wouldnāt be encrypted. If anyone knows of good iOS apps for generically accessing files on S3, especially with open source or audited encryption, Iām all eyes. It should be possible for someone to port Cyberduck and Cryptomator since theyāre open source, but thatās not going on my list in foreseeable future.
I still need to learn a lot about using Wasabi/S3. You can create users and groups, tailor access permissions, and a bunch more I havenāt looked at yet. Thatās useful even for one person, since you can give each client unique credentials; if someone steals your laptop you can clobber that access key without having to change all the others. It would also be good for file sharing with someone else, since you could restrict them to a particular file heirarchy (ābucketā). I donāt think Iād recommend Wasabi to my users because of the plethora of choices, though when I know more I could probably set up an easy enough ādo this exactly and donāt touch anything elseā sort of how-to for using it with Arq (for the subset who would obey the ādonāt touchā part).
Has anyone else been using Wasabi? Are there any gotchas I havenāt run into yet? I realize that they themselves arenāt backed up to other regions, which is presumably why theyāre cheaper than S3. Iād rather get hit with any bad news before I plunk down money and file transfer time.
Sorry canāt help you, as youāre doing way more technical stuff than I can do.
Anyway, IMO I donāt think most online backup services aimed at home and soho (small office/home office) users is up to scratch.
With Appleās (getting rather old) Time Machine, even backing up on Wifi at home it tends to flake out after a number of months with an error saying it canāt backup and has to reformat and start from scratch!
(Especially on wireless backups to something like a Time Capsule; I gave up on using one. I think itās likely something to do with the differences between sparse-bundles you get on wireless backups, vs. the standard āexact copy of file systemā you get on wired backup connections?).
Hence itās really time for Apple to release a new version, that can better handle multi-TBās of data many users now have, and can perhaps back-up to their iCloud servers as well as the local copies (we can do multiple locals, so why not local & cloud, given itās 2019?).
Reviving this thread, has anyone on this list looked at the new ARQ premium service based on Arq 7.
Iāve found Arq 7 to be a bit nicer than Arq 5, with both stand alone versions being very simple.
Iāve tried to set up a trial Arq Premium backup but faced multiple trial hurdles - in particular, you need to set up an Arq account and I canāt find any way to create an account in the App or on the web site - Iām waiting on a response from the developers about this though it looks like a bit of an oversight.
Thanks
Rob