# Great tool for offline backup - Arq



## Guest (Apr 17, 2012)

Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with this company or software, just a happy customer.

Online Backup for Mac | Arq | Haystack Software

It works a lot like Time Machine, but using Amazon S3 for your storage. Does incremental backups (meaning backs up only what's changed). Gives you the ability to select specific folders only (if you want), exclude files from them, etc. Simple interface, well thought out. You can restore from any machine anywhere (with Arq client software installed on it and configured). Amazon's S3 storage space is pretty economical and you can even enforce a "budget" within Arq -- you can tell it what you're monthly max you want to spend on storage is and it will trim the older backups accordingly to stay within your budget. I think I'm spending $5/month right now for 40G of space. There would also be charges on top of that for re-downloading any data you need (I think it's currently at about $0.12/GB -- but is a small price to pay when you actually do need to restore your data!). I'm not using it for full system backups, just critical data. You can't do a full system restore with this AFAIK like you can with Time Machine -- but that's not really a concern for me. Re-installing is not an issue if I have all my critical data!

Strictly speaking about online backup usage this is a much, much better option that dropbox and the like. Oh yes, and it offers full end-to-end strong encryption of all your data. Encrypted while in transit AND in storage on the S3 servers, and uses SSL (https) for all transport which ads a second layer of encryption. Not even Amazon can see your data when it's sitting on their servers.

Last but not least it supports bandwidth throttling and the like .. in "auto" mode it detects when other internet activity is happening and it throttles itself back. Alternately you can set it to a fixed amount of bandwidth usage or have it use max all the time (at the suffering of other users of the connection).

Worth the $30 for the client software without a doubt. I've been using it for just over a month now and have tested it quite thoroughly, including multiple restores, etc. I found zero bugs or issues with it to date, and that's a rarity -- I have a talent for finding bugs and issues with software.


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## Guest (Apr 17, 2012)

I should have said online backup in the title -- not offline backups (it's for offsite backups, DOH.


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## groovetube (Jan 2, 2003)

Interesting. Looking at amazon's pricing, doing around 60 gigs isn't overly expensive.


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## Guest (Apr 17, 2012)

groovetube said:


> Interesting. Looking at amazon's pricing, doing around 60 gigs isn't overly expensive.


Their pricing is pretty decent, especially considering the availability and the robustness (their docs say they can lose 2 complete data centres and still not lose your data). If you go with the reduced redundancy storage it's about 1/3 cheaper again too.

I've recently been doing CDN type stuff with a client using S3 and couldn't be happier with how it's all worked out.


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## Joker Eh (Jan 22, 2008)

Thanks for the info.


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