Arq Premium backup service

Software
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I canceled my safe deposit box at the bank branch near where I worked before retiring, only to discover than none of the closer branches had any boxes available. So now I had nowhere to put an offsite Mac backup.

After poking around the MPU forum, reading this article, and studying the Arq and BackBlaze websites, I have purchased a year of the Arq Premium service for $59.99 for my one Mac.

I preferred Arq’s greater configurability, lower cost, scheduled as opposed to continuous backups, available encryption, longer retention policy, less cumbersome restoration process, and no access via the web.

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Lower cost if you’re backing up 1TB, currently I’m backing up over 4TB with Backblaze.
As always you make the best decision for you :slight_smile:

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Yes, I made sure that my data would fit within their limits. At the same time, their overage charge doesn’t seem too bad, in case I do slip over.

An “unlimited plan” with BackBlaze would be appealing if I had more data to back up. Or I could switch to using Arq with a B2 backend.

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Interesting topic! I’ve been eyeing Arq for some time now, and I’ll probably get a license to do an encrypted backup to OneDrive. Might as well use that 1TB for something!

Since I need to pay for MS 365 anyway, I will get an Arq app license, as opposed to the Arq Premium service.

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I wonder who Arq’s provider is.

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Reddit thinks it is Wasabi.

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Yes. This is from their privacy policy.

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As I have posted many times, I am a big Arq fan.

I have, in the past, had to restore a substantial amount of “lost” data, which at the time was going to Amazon Glacier, and the restore was flawless.

A second time, my daughter had moved out of state for school, and of course the second day she was there, her MBAir died. (Turned out to be a failed system board.) Fortunately, there was one identical MBAir in stock at the Best Buy not far from her (this was a small town in Mississippi, so I was glad there was one available!). I ordered it online, she picked it up, did the initial setup, and installed Arq. We set up her restore, because we had had Arq on her computer as well, and by morning everything was restored and she was up and running.

In terms of storage costs, I use the standard Arq app, not Arq Premium, and I bought a lifetime Arq license years ago. I am currently sending my data to Wasabi, but to my own Wasabi account and data buckets.

I am considering moving to Glacier Deep Storage. It looks like it would be very cheap for my roughly 2TB of data. With GDS, it takes up to 12 hours to retrieve data and there is (I think) a charge for the outgoing transfer, but for the “emergency house burnt down” storage it’s a reasonable way to cut costs.

I do have BackBlaze as well, because my data is worth enough to me to pay for two online options just in case, but the downside to BackBlaze is that if you don’t want to pay extra for the 1 year or unlimited duration storage add-ons, if you lose something and don’t realize it for >30 days, it’s gone. With my Arq storage, I don’t have that issue.

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Just another note: I spent several hours earlier today writing a fairly complex KM Macro. A few hours later I discovered it was gone. No idea what happened. Presumably I accidentally deleted it. Even though my KM macros are stored in a folder sync’d via SynologyDrive, there were no previous versions available (which is itself odd, btw).

Thankfully, Arq had done a run at some point in between, and I just restored my .kmsync file and my macro is back.

I just changed my preferences in Arq from every 3 hours to every hour. Just in case.

I am sure BackBlaze would have also saved me on this one as well.

Just saying.

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Okay, now comes the part where I have to be patient waiting for the first Arq Premium backup of several hundred gigabytes to complete. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I’ve found Comcast upload speed is normally only 10% or so of the download speed you purchase. I timed my first Arq upload to Amazon S3 (in 2012) with a calendar :grinning:

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Yes, it is no speed demon. It is painful to watch the progress of this first backup. Now I begin to see the claimed advantages of BackBlaze: install it, run it, and forget it. Backups get performed continuously and little by little everything gets backed up (if all goes well).

But Arq is giving me what I thought I wanted :slightly_smiling_face: …a window onto what is happening and some ability to control and direct it. Once the first backup is complete, I think a daily scheduled backup will be just what I want.

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You probably already know that when it comes to backups, never forget it. Because “Feces occurs” :grinning:

Test your backups from time to time to insure everything is working properly. I didn’t do that when I was starting out and ended up losing company data when one of our servers crashed.

These days I just open Arqbackup, restore a couple of files from each volume, then open them to insure that they aren’t corrupted. It only takes 5 minutes every few weeks but its good insurance that my files will be there when I need to do a restore.

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Good advice. This Arq backup is my offsite last chance for recovery if I lose my Mac and all my backups. I also run daily and weekly Carbon Copy Cloner backups on a set of five external drives that I rotate. I still have a Time Capsule that I bought in 2018 when Apple withdrew their support for it. It is getting a little iffy though.

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BackBlaze can be scheduled if you don’t want continuous. I like having the web access as it lets me get to my files from anywhere.

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My first Arq Premium backup and a few subsequent ones were painfully slow. I then discovered that the default maximum threads for upload and CPU usage were very conservative. I changed those, with a little experimentation, and my daily backup is now much faster. If you edit your backup task you’ll find the relevant settings under Options.

Stephen

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I could just as easily have selected BackBlaze and almost did. And when I first started using Arq Premium, I had a moment where I asked myself, did I choose the wrong one? The Arq software and process was new to me and I didn’t understand the implications of the choices I could make in the Preferences pane. I didn’t at first notice the Pause button or the status information in the Mac menubar. I wasn’t convinced I could use my Mac as normal while Arq was running.The simplicity claimed for BackBlaze suddenly seemed like a better idea.

But now that I have a couple of days experience and am 33% of the way to having a complete first backup, things are good. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I previously used CrashPlan’s family plan that they discontinued but I had a multi-year prepaid plan. When it ran out I looked at Arq but decided BackBlaze was a better fit for me. My first backup took multiple months because Cox has usage caps and I didn’t want to bust it. I have over 3tb in BackBlaze.

As mentioned, once the initial backup completes, don’t forget to test the backup to verify you can get your files back.

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does anyone know whether the premium plan provide updated Arq (say version 8) if it is available during the subsription period?

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This is the most specific thing I’ve seen.

Arq 7 vs Arq Premium

An Arq Premium subscription includes the Arq app (and all updates) plus 1 TB of storage and up to 5 computers. (Additional storage usage is billed monthly per GB over 1 TB).