Arq Backup by Haystack Software is a Mac application that backs up your computer and any other drive attached to it to Amazon S3 and .
I’ve decided to review Arq Backup as a personal thank you note to the developer of this software. You see, I care about my data, and you should too.
Recently I’ve written about my revised backup strategy, but I think I didn’t make it clear that without Arq, this strategy would fail.
Arq is a jewel of a software, that the developer first and foremost created for himself.
I started thinking about Arq back in early 2009 because I wanted an easy-to-use backup program but couldn’t find one that worked well. I liked Time Machine and even bought a Time Capsule so I wouldn’t have to remember to plug in an external hard drive. But it still only backed up when I was at home near the Time Capsule, and if my house burned down or someone stole my computer and Time Capsule my stuff would be gone. I wanted online backup, at least for my most important documents and photos.
Likely because of that, the application shows a detail to attention and an integration with OS X rarely seen in online backup clients.
Setup
Arq works both as a stand-alone application or as an OS X agent (i.e. a service). In the latter case, you need to give Arq administrator permissions and from that moment on it lives quietly in your menubar.
During the setup you are asked for your Amazon AWS security credentials and the Amazon S3 budget (more on this later). At that point you’re ready to go.
Backup process
It’s as easy as dragging and dropping the folders you want to backup to the Arq main window.
Each time you do that, the software asks you whether you want to store that data on either S3 or Glacier. The beauty of the software is that these operations are incredibly user friendly and they work as you would expect.
Budget Backup
One of the problems with Amazon S3 is that you don’t know up front how much you are going to spend each month for your backups.
Sure, there are calculators available for it but the final cost of storing your data with Amazon also depends on the amount of calls you make to its services.
This makes it difficult to budget how much you want to spend. Arq solves this problem by enforcing a backup budget. With this functionality you can select up front how much you want to spend per month, and the software tells you how much data you’ll be able to store to stay within the budget.
Options
The option pane is divided in five tabs:
- S3 Budget
- Network
- S3 Schedule
- Glacier Schedule
- Advanced
Scheduling
I’ve already talked about the S3 budget in the previous section. The S3 and Glacier schedule options are self-explanatory. You can schedule your S3 and Glacier backups independently from each other. Options include the possibility to backup every x minutes (hours), daily at a certain time or manually.
Network
This tab allows you to specify the upload speed limits, automatically adjust the speed based on the network utilization or to use all available bandwidth.
Advanced
This is where you can select:
- Whether to run Arq as an agent
- If you want to have a system-wide menu bar
- Backup using administrator privileges
- Prevent the computer from going to sleep when backing up (useful on the first endless backup. I use for this purpose but it’s great to have this option built-in)
- Pause the backup if on battery
- Log level in case of errors.
The available options really allow you to customize Arq to adapt it to your way of working.
Usage
There is one takeaway point I want you to remember from this review:
Arq is incredibly light on system resources and pleasantly robust. Once you remember these two facts the only thing you need to do is to purchase the software.
Seriously, the developer has written a stable application that will happily live for months on your menubar, perform the backup at the scheduled time and give you piece of mind that your data is with Amazon as long as you keep on paying for the service.
The only effort required is to set up the backup dataset. Once you’ve done that you can go on with your life.
It’s also worth mentioning that your backups are encrypted on the client side, so the data you send to Amazon can be read only by you.
iOS app
This is the cherry on top of the cake. If you store your backups on Amazon S3, you can use this free app to access your data even from your iOS device.
Open source data format
The developer wanted to make sure that your backups survive the software’s lifespan. For this reason the backups created by Arq are in a similar format as the open-source version control software Git.
The developer has also uploaded to Github an open-source tool to restore your data, in case anything should happen to the commercial version of Arq.
This is another reason that convinced me that it was a good idea to invest in this application.
Restoring
You guessed it right restoring your data is as simple as selecting the backup set and either click on the restore button or drag & drop the files to your desktop.
Be aware that if you’ve opted to store your data to Glacier, the download will be delayed by about 4 hours.
Conclusions
Throughout the years, I’ve tried several online backup services. With each of them I’ve always questioned if the company behind it would survive until the moment I had to restore my data.
Amazon should give us more guarantees for the simple reason that it is a public listed company with a healthy balance sheet. Arq is the perfect companion to backup your data to Amazon S3 and Glacier. The fact that the developer initially devised the application for himself is proof of its quality.
At $39.99, Arq is not going to be your cheapest app on your dock but guys, we’re talking about protecting your data. Don’t be cheap, Arq Backup is totally worth it.