If you are starting from scratch, why not do it in Arq 5? If you need the snapshots that got converted you can always upgrade.
As of April 12, there have been 5 releases 6 releases of Arq v6 since the April 7 âmajor releaseâ.
Has anyone successfully migrated from Arq to one of the B2 partner integrator solutions? I notice that ChronoSync is one of the integrations â itâs a very solid app with excellent support.
Good point.
But Iâm still not sure whether I actually want to start from scratch, since I donât know how many GB I would have to upload again. If I know I can calculate how long that would take.
Extra important because I now have to work from home due to the Corona virus and thus need to have bandwidth available to do work.
I also work from home and was also having problems with uploading and downloading as well (large backups and sync files), but the bandwidth wasnât the problem. Dropbox was. It was throttling speed, if you can believe it.
Update from Stefan
And the Twitter account is back up.
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Itâs good to see he finally delivered an update. Hopefully heâll be able to make the fixes and put some QA in place too. That last thing is crucial for future success.
Apart from that, like I read somewhere else (here or reddit?): Arq auto upgrades somehow automagically. There is not setting to control that behavior. Hopefully thatâs on his long backlog too, as Iâm really not happy with giving up control over what gets installed on my computer. Especially not with a backup program. And even more so knowing what we know now about Arq.
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That poor developer now probably has some of the worst weeks of his life. Iâll definitely wait for a while until I upgrade.
Yes, this whole undertaking has destroyed some trust, and trust is fundamental for a backup solution. On the other hand, Arq has been in business for about 10 years now. Iâve been using it for years without problems - honestly, I think Iâve experienced more problems with Time Machine than with Arq. Iâm absolutely confident that the developer will learn from his mistakes and recover. And this will mean improved quality in the long run, once the current disaster is over.
I do understand though that someone who has lost his backup and spent hours (unsuccessfully) fixing problems will look at this from a less relaxed point of viewâŚ
By the way, @vco1: In Arq 5, there is at least a control box in the Advanced menu, âAutomatically update Arqâ. So I feel relatively safe here, even though I do have a lifetime license and could make the jump to Arq 6.
One important message from the Arq Twitter account: The Arq Agent is still native, not an Electron app. To me, this information is the greatest relief.
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The checkbox is in Arq 5 indeed. Not so in Arq 6 anymore. There it just silently updates. Without the option to change that behavior.
I like to see when my updates happen too, and possibly hold off for period of time.
Certainly not ideal, but a workaround would be to figure out the host name and redirect to 127.0.0.1 in the /etc/hosts file, or run pi-hole and blacklist there.
I upgraded to v6 on day one and have not received any upgrades. I did upgrade manually to v6.1.8 last night.
Did you have âautomatically update Arqâ selected in v5? I did not.
I think this has been added in a later update. My initial 6 version (6.0.222) didnât update automatically and silently(!) either. Only after i updated Arq to a newer 6.x version this started to happen.
It also shows in Arqâs settings screen.
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Got it. Everything has been running well and I had not needed to look at Settings. Thanks.
They even removed the v5 import from Arq v6:
I have decided to take my loss (more than 200 GB) and downgraded to v5 on all my systems.
My main (Windows) PC never succeeded in importing a backup, so I was able to âadoptâ that (300 GB) backup in v5
The two macOS backups converted to v6 a week ago (which is irreversible?), but could not run a single backup since. I threw away those backups (that 200 GB) and will start from scratch in v5.
This is even more discouraging than the prior news on this, in the thread above. It seems Arq issued a product without having any concept of backward compatibility, thus leaving itâs existing customers at a loss for how to upgrade and retain access to backup history via Arq.
It looks like they underestimated the complexity.
However, they have promised they will fix this by the end of June.
Personally I think itâs good that they take time to rethink this, instead of the trial & error with multiple daily updates.
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They (he?) really should have done that before releasing v6.
The more I hear about what will - and should - be changed to coming months, the more I wonder what they were thinkingâŚ
I look at it like this, âstuffâ happens. IMO itâs what happens next that counts.
Even big companies like Apple have been known to release buggy software. I seem to recall a problem or two with iOS 13 
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Iâve been following the criticism and I think WayneG is right, what happens next is important ⌠but also what has been. In all that Iâve read about Arq 6âs problems, I havenât seen the same level of venom for Arq 5, which is what Iâve been sticking with.
Well, yes and no. And thatâs why in software development (and elsewhere) theyâve introduced this concept of Quality Assurance. Or testing. Or whatever you want to call it.
I know there will always be bugs in software. Thatâs somewhat inevitable. But when your product is about backups, the last thing you want is that a new version f*cks up existing backups. And thatâs exactly what happened with Arq. And the dev also admitted his mistakes there by removing the option to import Arq 5 backups from later updates. Well, if thatâs the case you made a serious mistake with your initial upgrade. Thatâs more than just buggy software.
What happens next is certainly important. But may this also be a lesson for other developers. Especially the ones with a substantial user base. If you make fundamental changes to your applications, make sure youâre 100% confident that it wonât impact your (current) users. And in case something major goes wrong (shit happens): communicate. The worst thing the Arq developer could do was switching off his Twitter account. Even more so because there arenât many other ways to reach out to support (apart from mail, but thatâs a one-way road).
It would be nice if we could expect that from our vendors, but I wouldnât trust any company who said they were â100% confidentâ of anything they produced.
I have had backup software from a major enterprise vendor fail. And I have had servers destroyed by a service pack from a major operating system vendor.
I chose to upgrade to v6 on day one. I have multiple ways to restore my files and chose to take the risk associated with installing any major software upgrade soon after release. As it turned out, my upgrade was uneventful. Yes, mistakes with the Arq upgrade were made. And IMO, the lack of communication from the developer was worse than the software problems. Hopefully they learned from this and will do better in the future.
Each of us will decide if we will continue to use Arq backup. I will because Iâve been very pleased with Arq for several years and am satisfied with v6 at this point.