Basically the upfront cost for storage with Arq is always worse; you only use vendor storage if you factor the cost of your subscription to the software in as well, you want web access, or (and this was the point I was really making) you want an easier life for a marginal extra cost. It is absolutely a worse deal past the first TB, and gets worse the more TBs you add. At the moment, IDRive just about makes sense for me at 1.3 TB stored.
My 5 computer family license for Arq with “bring your own storage” is $50/year. Arq for 5 computers with their storage is $70/year. I’m paying B2 about $45/year.
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Yup.
And even though I do have a legacy Arq Lifetime licence, meaning I don’t have to factor in the software’s cost, I’d only spend about $14 a month at the current rate, plus I’d get four more computer uses and web access.
Of course, if you pay for the software then at some point you lose the discount advantage as the TBs add up and it’s more sensible to do BYOS, but right now it’s clear you want to be using Arq storage to actually save some money. And to be fair to Haystack Software, if your potential customers don’t know anything about cloud storage, it’s still a profitable deal that doesn’t punish you for storing reasonable amounts of critical data.
It wasn’t much of a project after all. I simply subscribed, exported my B2 backup set of folder to back up, imported that set into a new Arq Cloud Storage set with similar retention rules; I did this for three computers (one more to go). I also stopped the scheduled backup to B2 and will just go in periodically (once a month?) and apply the retention rules for the next 12 months. (I’m still using AWS Glacier for media files, but that costs me about $1.15 per month.)
I also have backup sets that save to my local Synology and they remained in place and were unaffected by the change in license. Really if I need to restore something, I’d be using the Synology anyway - the online storage is just more disaster recovery planning.
So the next 12-ish months will cost me more, but from then on I’ll save money.
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I have 5gbit/s symmetric fibre (lucky old me!), so this is mostly academic, but still: how exactly did you migrate? Just run both sets in parallel? IDRive offers s3-compatible migration (which ran more-or-less exactly at 1gbit/s) so it didn’t take long to just adopt the new target at the destination once the copy was done. But it wouldn’t be the end of the world to just configure both and use them; I certainly wouldn’t try using a tool like rclone to do it because then the target backup set wouldn’t actually be consistent, so you’d have one fewer backup sets.
Migrate is the wrong term for the backup sets. I simply started backing up the same folders to the new destination and stopped backing up to the old. Both are set to retain 24 hourly backups, 30 daily backups, 52 weekly backups, and 18 monthly backups, so the original B2 destinations should thin down considerably over time (I’ll turn off the hourly retention for those, then the daily retention next month), and the Arq Cloud Storage backups will start to gain more weekly and monthly backups.
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Ah, got it. So you’ll keep your history on B2 till you’re satisfied you no longer need it, basically, after a period of gradually applying more aggressive retention. That’s fair. I’ll probably just throw away my history at the earliest opportunity in order to reduce the footprint to as small as I can initially.