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Thanks to this thread I found out about ARQ. I'm very interested however I pay for Office 365 and use OneDrive a lot. But I would LOVE to have something like this program have another copy of my data off site and I don't mind paying for it. I have about 200 GB of data total. I modify maybe 10 files every day (the same ones) for a month and maybe add 300-800 pictures/videos a month.
Question --- does this work ok with folders under OneDrive/Dropbox/Google Drive? So I can tell it to monitor folders under OneDrive and it won't write a file inside of the OneDrive folder (causing OneDrive to upload it, change its hidden file, and results in tons of uploads).
Since I have OneDrive and local copies on my hard drives, considering Amazon Glacier.
Thanks for the thread - love apps like this where a developer works on it.
Question --- does this work ok with folders under OneDrive/Dropbox/Google Drive? So I can tell it to monitor folders under OneDrive and it won't write a file inside of the OneDrive folder (causing OneDrive to upload it, change its hidden file, and results in tons of uploads).
Since I have OneDrive and local copies on my hard drives, considering Amazon Glacier.
Thanks for the thread - love apps like this where a developer works on it.
Arq by default backs up everything in the Users folder, so it would also backup files in the locations you mentioned. But Arq would not ever write anything to those folders that would cause uploads to the various services (if I am understanding your question).
Wow, I've been looking for an app like this since the days of JungleDisk! (2008?). Just purchased a lifetime and let them know Macrumors helped me find it. Thank you!
Glad you like it. The dev. is very responsive also. I emailed him a question once on a Sunday and got an answer and a link to a test/beta to fix my issue later the same day.
Pretty impressed. Can't believe I didn't know about this earlier.
I have Arq installed on my Work PC, Macbook Air, Work laptop that I take home, and on my wife's Mini.
My Work data is about 3GB (I don't back up stuff I don't have to - less important data is stored locally and offsite by the company).
Personal data is about 5GB. " "
Will be backing up my 150GB of photos/videos soon just to Backblakze.
Initially I backed up my work and personal data to Amazon S3 - $.10 so far. I have additional backup locations to local spinning external drives and one to my personal Google Drive for redundancy.
Just spent this morning reading this entire thread and now I'm backing up all my data to Backblaze B2 and using that as my primary (Amazon S3 set to manual, Backblaze and external spinner locations set to backup to hourly).
Really happy to install this on my wife's Mac as she never saves her data to a cloud storage and she's starting her PhD this year - this app will monitor and backup everything. Setting her backups to go to Backblaze (Under 30GB).
I guess I'll use Amazon S3 as a backup backup for my work/personal data because it looks like it will cost me less than $.09/mo and I'll do those manually every few days. BackBlaze is now my primary and set to hourly or every 2 hours backup and will house my 150GB+ of photos/videos as well as work and personal data - I set up another B2 bucket and storage so I can do that manually without affecting my manual work/personal data backups.
Would be nice to change the title of the Arq Preference Types to more easily identify the 2 B2 backups I have set up.
It took me 3 days to download the 150+ GB of photos/videos I had stored for free on Google Drive with their takeout feature (worked really well). And took 10 mins (on ssd) to unzip the massive zip files. I can't wait to upload this so it's not just on my local spinner at home. (My iPhone only has 10GB of photos, I used to clear them off with Google Photos).
Now that I see how cheap it is, I'll probably be backing up more and more items.
100% happy with Arq and 100% satisfied with what I've seen so far with Backblaze. When $ permits, I'll have to buy another license to say thanks to the developer.
A special thanks to @SteveJobzniak for the hours and hours of time he's saved me!
I have Arq installed on my Work PC, Macbook Air, Work laptop that I take home, and on my wife's Mini.
My Work data is about 3GB (I don't back up stuff I don't have to - less important data is stored locally and offsite by the company).
Personal data is about 5GB. " "
Will be backing up my 150GB of photos/videos soon just to Backblakze.
Initially I backed up my work and personal data to Amazon S3 - $.10 so far. I have additional backup locations to local spinning external drives and one to my personal Google Drive for redundancy.
Just spent this morning reading this entire thread and now I'm backing up all my data to Backblaze B2 and using that as my primary (Amazon S3 set to manual, Backblaze and external spinner locations set to backup to hourly).
Really happy to install this on my wife's Mac as she never saves her data to a cloud storage and she's starting her PhD this year - this app will monitor and backup everything. Setting her backups to go to Backblaze (Under 30GB).
I guess I'll use Amazon S3 as a backup backup for my work/personal data because it looks like it will cost me less than $.09/mo and I'll do those manually every few days. BackBlaze is now my primary and set to hourly or every 2 hours backup and will house my 150GB+ of photos/videos as well as work and personal data - I set up another B2 bucket and storage so I can do that manually without affecting my manual work/personal data backups.
Would be nice to change the title of the Arq Preference Types to more easily identify the 2 B2 backups I have set up.
It took me 3 days to download the 150+ GB of photos/videos I had stored for free on Google Drive with their takeout feature (worked really well). And took 10 mins (on ssd) to unzip the massive zip files. I can't wait to upload this so it's not just on my local spinner at home. (My iPhone only has 10GB of photos, I used to clear them off with Google Photos).
Now that I see how cheap it is, I'll probably be backing up more and more items.
100% happy with Arq and 100% satisfied with what I've seen so far with Backblaze. When $ permits, I'll have to buy another license to say thanks to the developer.
A special thanks to @SteveJobzniak for the hours and hours of time he's saved me!
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Wow ... it is 5:07PM I have 85 GB uploaded to Backblaze after starting backups around 9am. VERY impressed!!! (FIOS 95/95 mbps (up/down)).
Spent some time looking at this company - really really like what I see. Always loved their annual hard drive failure reports. With an estimated ~200GB total and no S3 like costs to upload/list - I'm looking at $1/mo with Backblaze ($.005/gb). Wow. Can't beat that.
Spent some time looking at this company - really really like what I see. Always loved their annual hard drive failure reports. With an estimated ~200GB total and no S3 like costs to upload/list - I'm looking at $1/mo with Backblaze ($.005/gb). Wow. Can't beat that.
I *really* want to like Arq, but I get too many errors each backup for me to trust it right now.
[doublepost=1517132625][/doublepost]
Anything greater than 2TB becomes costly for B2. With that amount to back up Crashplan for Business is the cheapest option.
I’m genuinely curious - are the errors with Arq or the backup service ? I’ve spent the last day backing up 10gb to S3 and 180 GB to B2 across 5 computers. Going well for me so far. Two of the three computers are Windows and rest are Mac. All also backup to an external drive and two back up to Google Drive as well as B2.
@BigMcGuire Hi - they are "error reading requests" xxx: Read timed out".
I get about 1-15 of them roughly every 2nd backup. I have found out that some of them are due to a database being open (Arq does not backup open files/databases) but I think there are other issues as well.
I get about 1-15 of them roughly every 2nd backup. I have found out that some of them are due to a database being open (Arq does not backup open files/databases) but I think there are other issues as well.
Another vote for B2 and Arq. Very happy with that combo, nearly six months in.
Well, all my data is on Backblaze via Arq. Absolutely thrilled to find out that the ~170GB of data I had, had a ton of duplicates and triplicates. Meaning the 150GB+ of photos was actually considerably less - about 105GB due to duplicates. I found out about this because Backblaze does not count the duplicates against my total storage. Confirmed this with ccleaner and found gigs and gigs of duplicates.
Tested this theory by creating a new folder, put 800MB of photos I know I already backed up, did the backup, and yep, overall size and file count didn't change. Very nice.
Current Files:
131,731
Current Size:
136.7 GB
Wife's data, my data, my photos, everything is backed up! Interested to see what the estimated billing says tomorrow. My estimate shows $.50-$.70
Tested this theory by creating a new folder, put 800MB of photos I know I already backed up, did the backup, and yep, overall size and file count didn't change. Very nice.
Current Files:
131,731
Current Size:
136.7 GB
Wife's data, my data, my photos, everything is backed up! Interested to see what the estimated billing says tomorrow. My estimate shows $.50-$.70
Got my first payment processed for ~150GB yesterday: $0.50 <smile>
How cool! How long did it take for you to get a bill? I'm 4 days and it shows 9 cents at the moment. I have 149.9GB. Very happy with Backblaze - it is now my permanent backup solution. Just wish there was a super easy way to backup my photos to it from my iPhone (I only use Google Photos so I've been doing Google Takeout every few days, lol).
Urgent help is needed.
I have a 1TB Dropbox account which are used for boy ARQ backups and to store lab research data for collaboration. Th latter consumes less than 20GB.
Now the ARQ backups in Dropbox has exceeded 1TB and I am getting warnings from Dropbox.
When I try to delete any old backups, ARQ said that there is "insufficient space". Apparently there is no memory left to carry out any deletion instruction. Now I can not access any of my lab data stored in Dropbox. My job depends on accessing this data.
I also tried setting the data budget to 800GB and hit "enforced ". This did not work. Apparently, one can not set a lower budget when the backup storage has max out the storage limit.
Is there a solution or I have to delete ARQ and all its backups and to start from scratch again? It will take me about two weeks to do the initial upload.
If u could help, Please send detailed instructions as I am not a computer person.
Your assistance will be greatly appreciated.
I have a 1TB Dropbox account which are used for boy ARQ backups and to store lab research data for collaboration. Th latter consumes less than 20GB.
Now the ARQ backups in Dropbox has exceeded 1TB and I am getting warnings from Dropbox.
When I try to delete any old backups, ARQ said that there is "insufficient space". Apparently there is no memory left to carry out any deletion instruction. Now I can not access any of my lab data stored in Dropbox. My job depends on accessing this data.
I also tried setting the data budget to 800GB and hit "enforced ". This did not work. Apparently, one can not set a lower budget when the backup storage has max out the storage limit.
Is there a solution or I have to delete ARQ and all its backups and to start from scratch again? It will take me about two weeks to do the initial upload.
If u could help, Please send detailed instructions as I am not a computer person.
Your assistance will be greatly appreciated.
support@arqbackup.com
I would email the developer with this one. I don't want to guess what might be wrong here and have you lose data.
The dev.. is usually pretty good about answering questions quickly.
[doublepost=1517445622][/doublepost]Thanks weaselboy for ur kind response.
I urgently need to access my research data stored in Dropbox for work reason.
Do u or anyone know how I could delete, wipe out ARQ and all its associated backups in Dropbox?
I am worry that if I just simply delete ARQ on the laptop, the backups which have been stored in the cloud, in this case Dropbox, do not know they have to self destruct and thus still store in Dropbox and my problem remain unresolved.
How cool! How long did it take for you to get a bill? I'm 4 days and it shows 9 cents at the moment. I have 149.9GB. Very happy with Backblaze - it is now my permanent backup solution. Just wish there was a super easy way to backup my photos to it from my iPhone (I only use Google Photos so I've been doing Google Takeout every few days, lol).
It's been about two weeks, now, since I found this thread (thanks Weaselboy), voted 'yay' based upon the contributors (posting here) confidence and kudos, signed-on with B2, and populated it via Arq.
Of course, I was uploading way too much, and not all the correct data, so I set things to manual, and am currently re/organising my data for efficiency before I update my B2 storage.
I have the Lifetime Arq license, now, so there is plenty of time to tune to fineness
Regards, splifingate
You should be able to just login to the Dropbox web interface at https://www.dropbox.com/ and delete the folder from there.
Then go to Arq preferences and delete Dropbox as a backup destination and everything should be gone.
weaselboy, sincere thanks for ur help and I am sorry that I idn't know u had posted a reply.
I did write to ARQ support but they did not offer a solution. Support told me that because there was no more space in Dropbox and as result ARQ could not upload a new config file, that is nothing more ARQ could do. So I ended up deleting all ARQ backups stored in Dropbox and thus lost all backups. Fortunately, I also do time machine backup. It seems that TM offers another layer of protection and at no cost.
This incidence suggests it is best to set a budget limit for ARQ backup. This will delete the oldest backup when the budget limit is reached.
I have a question about the above - why not just delete a few of the old Arq backups in Drobpox? Wouldn't that allow a new backup to happen? I realize that when Dropbox gets full it doesn't allow users to see new synced data, I assume that is what dai-leung was talking about when he said he needed to see his research dearly? It almost seems like the research being backed up to dropbox was dropbox data?
Agreed about time machine - I use it too but I have had it fail on me twice when I really needed data that I thought it had backed up (but it didn't). I guess no backup is perfect. I'm pretty happy with the now 169GB of data I have in Backblaze. I have a few Arq secondary backups to my Google Drive (hidden via Apps data and not visible to Google Drive itself) -- maybe that's what Dropbox does too and that's why he had to delete everything? Makes sense I guess.
I basically have 3 layers of backups with Arq, 4 if you really count it.
1. I have Arq backing up my data to an external drive hourly for all my systems that aren't laptops. For those that are, manual backups to external drives when they're connected.
2. I have an Ohio Amazon S3 backup for my data that is manual because it is expensive.
3. I have my data being backed up to Google Drive via Arq.
4. I backup all my data to Backblaze B2 - my primary.
A lot of my data resides in OneDrive so that's another layer too. My Mini backups my OneDrive and is always on, so my laptop with OneDrive, I back that up to Google Drive (no need to do B2 on the laptops because tha'd be duplication).
Absolutely LOVE how I can connect my iPhone to my Mac Mini, have Apple Photos take all the photos from my iPhone and the library resides on an external drive, then Arq backs it up only if the external drive is connected.. No need to download Google Photos with takeout anymore and painfully use scripts to take out the images and put into one folder.
Agreed about time machine - I use it too but I have had it fail on me twice when I really needed data that I thought it had backed up (but it didn't). I guess no backup is perfect. I'm pretty happy with the now 169GB of data I have in Backblaze. I have a few Arq secondary backups to my Google Drive (hidden via Apps data and not visible to Google Drive itself) -- maybe that's what Dropbox does too and that's why he had to delete everything? Makes sense I guess.
I basically have 3 layers of backups with Arq, 4 if you really count it.
1. I have Arq backing up my data to an external drive hourly for all my systems that aren't laptops. For those that are, manual backups to external drives when they're connected.
2. I have an Ohio Amazon S3 backup for my data that is manual because it is expensive.
3. I have my data being backed up to Google Drive via Arq.
4. I backup all my data to Backblaze B2 - my primary.
A lot of my data resides in OneDrive so that's another layer too. My Mini backups my OneDrive and is always on, so my laptop with OneDrive, I back that up to Google Drive (no need to do B2 on the laptops because tha'd be duplication).
Absolutely LOVE how I can connect my iPhone to my Mac Mini, have Apple Photos take all the photos from my iPhone and the library resides on an external drive, then Arq backs it up only if the external drive is connected.
. No need to download Google Photos with takeout anymore and painfully use scripts to take out the images and put into one folder.In Dropbox 1TB space, my research collaboration data took up 15GB and the rest was used for ARQ backup. When all the memory space was used up, I could not access my research data nor ARQ.
According to ARQ support, ARQ needs memory space to delete old backups by uploading a new config file. When there is no more space in Dropbox, ARQ can no longer execute the config file. The only way to get out of this jam is go to Dropbox and delete the ARQ entire backup as a whole. After deletion, I am now able to access my research data again.
This inaccessibility would not have happened if I had set a budget limit during ARQ's initial setup. Had I done so, the oldest backup would have been deleted when the backup storage amount exceeded the budget limit.
Thanks for the info! My wife's college for her research also uses Dropbox. Thank you for letting me know what happened. Will do with her setup too for budget limits.
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I have some question about backing up multiple computers. Would appreciate for answers.
Question 1:
I have two computers A and B. First I installed ARQ in computer A, set up all the backup parameters and then completed the initial upload of the home folder of computer A to a cloud provider.
I then turned off computer A and installed ARQ in computer B and setup the backup parameters exactly the same as computer A.
Computer B will start upload the initial upload to the same cloud provider while computer A is powered off. Does ARQ do a new backup for computer B? That is there are now two backups in the cloud, one from computer A and one from computer B.
Question 2:
Now I turned on both computer A and B and both start to do backup. What will happen to the backups?
Question 3:
Now Computer A is off and I want to do work using computer B. My purpose is to prevent B from uploading anything to the cloud and thus ruins computer A's backup. So I : (1) unplug the wireless network; (2) then turn on computer B and after boot up, immediately go to the ARQ manual and hit "pause"; (3) finally turn on the wireless network.
Will these steps prevent B from uploading anything at all to the destination cloud?
Question 1:
I have two computers A and B. First I installed ARQ in computer A, set up all the backup parameters and then completed the initial upload of the home folder of computer A to a cloud provider.
I then turned off computer A and installed ARQ in computer B and setup the backup parameters exactly the same as computer A.
Computer B will start upload the initial upload to the same cloud provider while computer A is powered off. Does ARQ do a new backup for computer B? That is there are now two backups in the cloud, one from computer A and one from computer B.
Question 2:
Now I turned on both computer A and B and both start to do backup. What will happen to the backups?
Question 3:
Now Computer A is off and I want to do work using computer B. My purpose is to prevent B from uploading anything to the cloud and thus ruins computer A's backup. So I : (1) unplug the wireless network; (2) then turn on computer B and after boot up, immediately go to the ARQ manual and hit "pause"; (3) finally turn on the wireless network.
Will these steps prevent B from uploading anything at all to the destination cloud?
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Arq knows they are separate computers and it will be stored separately in the backup (to answer questions 1, 2, and 3) - check out my screenshot:
It is treated as separate from each computer. So, here are my wife's computers and my computers. Yes, I'm a Star Trek fan and I like the Borg, naming my computers and iPhone after them. This screenshot is from the Restore Files portion of Arq (under the Configure Backups on the main application).
So if you have Dropbox syncing everything, you really only want one computer backing up to Dropbox. --- My Mac Mini is the only one, out of all those computers, that is backing up OneDrive. The others are backing up other unique things from their local hard drive (documents folder, desktop, downloads, etc...).
On all my computers I have OneDrive that syncs my data/work. I have my Mac Mini backing up the OneDrive folder to Backblaze B2. The other Backblaze B2 backups from the other computers are the Document folders and non-OneDrive folders. My wife uses Dropbox too but I have her backing up to my Backblaze B2 account too.