• Arqbackup.com Website. Cloud Backup For Mac

During this review, we’ll be taking a look at, a desktop solution available for both Windows and Mac. Arq provides a measure of versatility that you won’t find with all-in-one options like Backblaze, letting you turn cloud storage services like Dropbox and OneDrive into a backup provider, much like Cloudwards.net favorite does. However, compared to the features and look described in our, Arq falls a little short. While certainly capable of getting the job done, Arq comes across as dated and won’t appeal to many users. If that includes you, we’d recommend checking our roundup for some niftier ideas. Otherwise, keep reading to find out what Arq Backup is all about. Alternatives for Arq Backup.

Arq keeps multiple versions of your files — a backup history. So if you discover a file was corrupted or accidentally deleted, you can go back and get the old version. Back up external hard drives, NAS files, whatever you want.

Arq provides a backup client that can be used with several different storage options, including some of our, like. That lets you turn ordinary cloud storage into online backup, taking advantage of Arq’s automatic backup scheduling, encryption, de-duplication and restore capabilities. The client handles backup reasonably well and doesn’t limit the size or type of files you can backup.

However, it takes a bit more work to manage than a more consumer-friendly tool like Backblaze (check out our for more on that), and hasn’t nearly as many features as CloudBerry Backup or Duplicati, both of which take a similar, agnostic “choose-your-own storage” approach. Missing features include disk-image backup and mobile capabilities. Arq software can be purchased for a one-time fee of $49.95. This will grant you a lifetime, transferable license that can be used for your computer or server. You can try the service out for free for 30 days, too. It’s important to understand that Arq doesn’t come with any online backup space. This will be a separate purchase that will likely require a monthly or annual subscription.

Far from being a con, however, this approach actually provides Arq with a good deal more flexibility than all-in-one online backup options like Carbonite and IDrive. There are eight cloud options available at the moment: Amazon Drive, Amazon S3/Glacier, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Cloud, Backblaze B2, OneDrive and Wasabi and any S3-compatible server. You can also backup to your NAS device or a file server if you want to keep a backup on site. While the selection will probably suit most users just fine, it’s not nearly as impressive as the fifty-plus available with CloudBerry Backup.

A CloudBerry Backup desktop license is also cheaper, costing just $29.99. Arq desktop clients are available for Windows and Mac. Installation only takes a minute. When you start it up, Arq will walk you through the basic steps of setting up your backup plan, though many settings will need to be tweaked later on. The tool itself is pretty straightforward if you have some technical knowledge, but it does feel somewhat like a relict of the past (think 1995).

It certainly won’t win any beauty awards. If you really don’t want to work to maintain your backup plan, you’d be better off going with a service like, neither of which require that you configure your own storage.

Or, if you like the idea of picking and configuring your own storage, CloudBerry Backup gives you more options, is more user friendly and looks much prettier. One issue we discovered with the tool is that the edit destination pane was too big for our computer screen, causing some of the options to scrunched. There’s no way to change the size so that it will appear in screen and there isn’t a vertical scroll option to move down, either, so we weren’t able to alter our “budget” settings (see image, below). Arq doesn’t have any mobile apps for accessing your data. File Backup & Restoration. After you install Arq, the first thing it will ask you to do is select a backup destination. As mentioned, there are eight different cloud storage options available that you can select from.

SFTP backup to your own server is another option, as is backup to an external drive. For our tests, we set up a backup plan using Amazon S3. To do that, we had to generate security credentials for our S3 account.

If you’d like to learn how to do that, we have a guide you can check out. The wizard then prompts us to create a storage bucket on one of the many Amazon S3 servers.

Afterwards, you’ll need to set up an encryption password. This is a private password that only you know. As such, if you forget it, you’ll lose access to your backup.

Arq automatically selects the C drive to backup. However, you can choose additional folders and change your backup schedule if you want to. You can add exclusions to your backup by file or folder name, including file extension. Backups are run every hour by default and are run incrementally, so only changes since the last backup are processed. You can alter the schedule from the destinations preferences pane by double-clicking on your destination.

You choose to back based on a set duration, back once a day a specific time or only run manual backups. From the advanced preferences pane, you can also select an option called “thin backups from hourly to daily to weekly.” By doing so, Arq will save all of your hourly backups for the last 24 hours, all of your daily backups from the past month and weekly backups. Arq automatically performs de-duplication when backing up so that the same file content isn’t stored multiple times. You can restore files by using the restore hierarchy on the left side.

Your files will appear in the center pane. Select what you want and click the “restore” button near the bottom. Arc also lets you restore previous versions of files. All previous versions of files are stored, which is great. There’s no way to create a versioning policy, but storing that many versions shouldn’t be an issue because Arq processes backups incrementally, only copying the parts of files that changed rather than the entire file. Arq lets you set up private encryption so that your files are scrambled prior to leaving your computer and are decrypted until your restore them.

That way, no matter what storage provider you decide to use, that provider will never be able to read or scan your files. The level of encryption used is 256-bit AES.

Beyond that, the level of security and privacy you get will depend on the storage provider you choose. All of the options available store data on in designed to withstand natural disasters and physical and virtual attacks. So, you data should be pretty safe regardless of whichever you choose. Support for Arq can be obtained by email Arq states that it tries to answer all requests within one business day. We put that to the test by emailing a few test questions to Arq support. Responses were received within the allotted timeframe, even on a Saturday.

Arqbackup.com Website. Cloud Backup For Mac

There are no live support options for Arq, even for business customers. However, the quick response times should get most issues resolved quickly.

Support for storage issues will go through your preferred cloud service, anyway. Arq does have a documentation center if you prefer to figure things out on yourself. However, there are only a handful of articles and no search option. Those articles that are available are well done, though, with straightforward instructions and screenshots. It’s hard to shake the impression that Arq was designed entirely by an engineer. It has that certain utilitarian look. Isn’t a particularly bad backup tool, but there are far better options out there: we recommend any novice user check out our for an overview.

For a tool with similar capabilities, that’s CloudBerry Backup. If you’re a Mac user, check out our article on. If you really want to take full advantage of the cloud, and are both much better options that will likely cost you less money, once the price of storage is factored in.

We’d love to hear from our readers on their own Arq experiences, good or bad, so please feel free to hit us up in the comments below. And, as always, thanks for reading. I’ve been trying Arq as a possible replacement for CrashPlan. I’m probably going to abandon it, hoping that Cloudberry will serve my needs better. Arq makes a big deal about using a standard backup format.

I don’t know whether this means that other cloud backup programs can read its archives. I’d be interested in comments on this.

Your feature list for Arq says “Keeps deleted files: 30”. I suggest that you list this in the Cons section at the top. You noted problems with a window too large for a small screen. I had a different problem with fixed size windows. I usually run my Windows display magnification at 125%. This caused clipping, and forced me to adjust some settings blindly using tab and enter. Support response was “Arq does not support display scaling on Windows”.

This fits your “looks like 1995” judgement: no scrolling or resizing. Scheduling of local and cloud backups play poorly together. If the cloud backup takes weeks (and mine was going to), no other backup runs in the mean time.

I set the pause option on the cloud backup to give my local backup a chance to run, but it turns out that the pause option, despite being in the destination options, is actually an application option and does not permit a different backup to start. Support could only suggest “periodically stop Arq” to allow the local backup. This of course is unacceptable, since it can result in files not being backed up for weeks.

Manual action for backups is completely unacceptable. (My rule: Backup Is Boring, and won’t happen if you have to think about it.) Arq cannot sent email notifications using the usual port 465, even though a mail client on the same computer was using this port. Instead, Arq requires port 587. Support did provide this information. However, not all providers accept this port for SMTP: fastmail.com does, but yahoo.com does not. After a sequence of reconfiguring the backup schedule, ArqAgent started using 100% of one CPU. Support response was “set the log level to Debug, then” email the log file.

Of course I could not do the latter, since the problem, though serious, was not reproducible. Applications should by default maintain information to diagnose major problems (though failure to do so is common). I use Arq because there are no alternatives, but I am not happy with it. I have a problem with Arq using 100% of a core.

They claim to be windows native, but that is not true. Its a.Net application.

The open source code was created by Arq, so its really just public documentation of their proprietary format. The other negative is that it scans for file changes which can take 15 minutes and peg a CPU core, and has no real-time support.

So scheduling once per hour is just a resource hog. I have to schedule at 4 hour intervals. I’ve been using Arq on our Macs for about 10 years.

Arq has grown their service markedly since the early days and the customer support is beyond excellent. I’m currently backing up three Macs to a Dropbox account. I’ve tried multiple other services including BackBlaze, Spider Oak, Carbonite, etc. Some offer a few features that I’d like to see in Arq, but I’ve always returned to Arq (actually, never left it, just trialed the others). Pricing is more than reasonable, and although I’ve only had a few questions or concerns over the years, they were addressed by Arq support immediately. That means a lot in my book.

If you’re looking for a lot of “eye candy” in an application you may be disappointed. I’m more impressed with what works and works well and is professionally supported.

I can highly recommend Arq. Thanks for the input, RSA.

I probably gave ARQ too cursory a look because the design looks about 30 years old. I’ll consider taking another look at it. Certainly, some of the providers you’ve mentioned – SpiderOak, Carbonite and even Backblaze – have some speed issues.

Have you tried CloudBerry Backup? It’s a bit like Arq in that it’s a “choose-your-own-cloud” backup provider, with support for Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, Azure and about fifty other services. It has quite a few more features than Arq, too. Check out our review (there’s a free trial): I’ll look at giving Arq another look, myself. Best of luck.

Arq Screenshot For years, has been often overlooked when talking about backup solutions for the Mac, despite the fact that it is one of the easiest and most flexible options, as well as the most configurable. If you are really concerned about the privacy and security of your backups, you should take a close look at Arq. Today marks, a little over 6 years since, and it contains many awesome new features, but one significant change that I want to highlight right up front is this: Arq v5 moves from a per computer license to a per user license. That means that instead of having to buy a new license for each Mac you own, one license covers them all.

This makes Arq a much more affordable option for people who use multiple Macs. It also means this is the time to take a closer look at what Arq offers. There are a few things that you should know about me as we get into this review.

First, I am a little obsessive about backups. “Two is one and one is none.” Everyone should have at least 2 backups of their Mac:. a bootable clone made. a “versioned” backup that keeps multiple copies of files, so if you save a bad version of a file over a good version, you can get it back. Arq but does make “versioned” backups. If you have used or seen demos of Time Machine, that is an example of versioned backups, but Time Machine only works for a drive physically connected to your computer, which is easy for desktops, but not to much for laptops. Apple tried to solve this problem with the, which offers the same features as Time Machine, but over the network.

At least in theory. In practice, both Time Machine and Time Capsule have a lot of issues, so much so that I no longer recommend either of them. (“Better than nothing, probably,” is the nicest thing I can say about Time Machine/Capsule.) Instead I recommend Arq or some other app which will backup without requiring a physical connection to your computer, like Time Machine does, and which uses something more reliable than Time Capsule. “Where can Arq backup to? The answer is: almost anywhere. Here’s the official list of configurable destinations.

Screenshot of Arq’ Destinations picker. including and. Other S3-Compatible Service. SFTP (any). A folder on your drive or NAS Those last two are especially important if you want to control your backups from end to end. You could backup one Mac to another, or to a, or to another NAS that you have physical and administrative control of, and know that it was completely secure. Pricing on each service can vary widely depending on how much data you want to backup and how you might need to eventually restore it.

If you have more than one Mac (say, for example, a desktop and a laptop), it’s easy to set up Arq to backup the laptop to your desktop, and then you can backup the desktop using Arq, Backblaze, CrashPlan, and/or SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner. If you are looking for the most reliable and least expensive solution over time, buying a 3-4 TB external drive plus Arq is probably the way to go. You can either backup to another Mac on your network or (new with version 5) backup directly to a NAS or other folder on your Mac.

Arq has announced but it is not yet available so I was not able to test it. Setting up Arq Getting Arq ready to go is super-simple. You tell it where you want to backup, you enter your credentials, and go. Unlike some providers, such Backblaze, you can choose any files that you want to backup. Want to backup /usr/local/?

Have a NAS drive mounted via AFP that you want to backup? Backblaze won’t back that up, but Arq will. You will be asked to enter an encryption key. This is the part that separates Arq from other services. Arq will never ask you to enter that key into their website, because their website doesn’t have your backup information: you do, and only you. (I highly recommend creating and storing a random encryption key using.) “Why should I trust Arq?” Six years of developing for the Mac gives you a good reason to trust that Arq is around for the long haul. The so even if the app stops being developed, users should still be able to get their data out of the backups.

And in an age where the U.S. Government often considers itself deserving of access to any information it wants, you have to weigh the potential security risks of any cloud-based system that does not give you the only set of encryption keys. With Arq you can know that everything is encrypted on your computer before it hits the net, no one has access to those files, and if you really want to be secure, you can make sure you only sync to computers you have direct, physical access to and control over. Pricing If you are a new Arq user, Arq 5 is $50/user. That license will work for all your Mac (version 10.7 or later) and Windows (version 7 or later) computers. That license is “perpetual” meaning that you can continue to use it for as long as you want, and the developer will continue to offer support.

In fact, he even went to great lengths to make sure Arq 5 ran on 10.7.5 for me because I have one Mac I cannot upgrade beyond that. Arq 4 users can upgrade to for $25, or they can get Arq 5 upgrade plus lifetime upgrades for $55. “What is a “Lifetime Upgrade” and why would I want it?” A “Lifetime Upgrade” means that you will get a license of all future versions of Arq for $0.

For example, a few months ago when I decided to buy Arq 4, I paid $50 for Arq 4 plus $30 for the “lifetime upgrade” option, so $80 total. Now that Arq 5 is out, I will get it for $0. When Arq 6 comes out, I will get it for $0. When Arq 7 comes out you get the idea. Basically you are pre-paying as a way to signal support to the developer now for future versions. I always encourage people to a) test software first to make sure you like it, if you can, and b) buy a lifetime upgrade if it is something that the developer offers.

To be clear, I have no personal interest in whether or not you do. I paid for my Arq license outright, long before I even heard that Arq 5 was coming out, and long before I decided to write a review about it. I won’t get any “commissions” or anything like that.

I just really like this software and developer. Long-time members of the Mac community know that there are some apps which are not only well-made, but which they are backed by some fantastic developers. Arq is in that league.

That matters to me, and I suspect it matters to most Mac users who are thinking about backups. Odds and Ends, This and That One of the few drawbacks to Arq compared to Backblaze or CrashPlan is that there is no iOS app, so you can’t access your backups from your iPad or iPhone/iPod touch. That being said, I’ve tried CrashPlan and Backblaze’s apps, and they aren’t great.

I’ve never been tempted to use either of them again. But if you were in a pinch, they do exist, so that is a consideration. Here’s a 90-second introduction video.

Want all the nitty-gritty details? That’s more than twice as long as Backblaze offers. Personally, I am using SFTP to backup to my MacBook to my machine (off-site backup), as well as my Synology (local backup). I also jettisoned my Time Machine drive and am using that for direct connected backups as well.

Although I’ve only been using the demo for a short while, all of the tests I have run have done extremely well. The ability to search backups is great for those times when you know what file you are looking for, but not where it is. As much as I love Backblaze, I have always found restoring from it to be a bit clunky. Arq “just works” for me. I was a huge fan of Arq version 4, but the pricing structure could keep people away. With the new licensing structure, now is the right time to take a close look at how Arq 5 can fit into your backup strategy.

You do have a backup strategy, right? Beyond just “Hope that my drive never dies or that it will give me plenty of warning before it does so I can back it up then.” Right? If not, there’s no time like the present.