What would you do if your business burned down? What if a natural disaster destroyed that "fireproof safe" you keep your most important documents in? Would you start over or just give up?
How would you cope with losing every picture taken from your child's first 5 years of time on earth? How could you remember all the smiles at the wedding of you to your lover?
What would you do when your loving dog runs under your desk to greet you and sends both your laptop and external backup off the desk causing irreversible damage to the drives? (You better not say get upset with Mr. Barky von Schnauzer, he only loves you!)
There are two types of people when it comes to backing up your data: Those that have their data backed up, and those that wish they did. We often take for granted how much our personal life and memories, business, and education depend on digital data storage — and how the most commonly failed component of personal computing is purely responsible for said storage. Now, being a site related to Mac technologies, it would only be appropriate that I mention Time Machine, but as you can infer from the opener of this post, local backups are simply not adequate and even time machine alters the binary contents of files.
I have tried almost every major off-site, consumer backup solution out there and have found only two stand up to the standards I demand: Reliability, speed, usability, and transparency. Amazon S3 provides the speed and reliability to any developer. In fact, S3 is so fast that my 40/5 mbps bandwidth is fully saturated when uploading and retrieving my data. Amazon S3 offers an incredible service to the world wide web; their cost per GB are unbeatable and the reliability of systems is world class. Unfortunately, Amazon only provides tools for developers to integrate S3 into their own systems, there is no directly sponsored application or backup tool. In comes 3rd party developers and their solutions.
Arq:
I started using Arq a few months ago and have been nothing but happy with it — Arq seems to do it all right. Being only developed for the Mac, the creator has put alot of polish into the design and functionality of Arq, and it makes for a phenomenal user experience.
The most important fact, bar none, is Arq’s ability to preserve backups in a 1:1 manner. Arq, along with Jungle Disk, passed all 20 tests put out by Backup-Bouncer:
Verifying: basic-permissions ... ok (Critical) Verifying: timestamps ... ok (Critical) Verifying: symlinks ... ok (Critical) Verifying: symlink-ownership ... ok Verifying: hardlinks ... ok (Important) Verifying: resource-forks ... Sub-test: on files ... ok (Critical) Sub-test: on hardlinked files ... ok (Important) Verifying: finder-flags ... ok (Critical) Verifying: finder-locks ... ok Verifying: creation-date ... ok Verifying: bsd-flags ... ok Verifying: extended-attrs ... Sub-test: on files ... ok (Important) Sub-test: on directories ... ok (Important) Sub-test: on symlinks ... ok Verifying: access-control-lists ... Sub-test: on files ... ok (Important) Sub-test: on dirs ... ok (Important) Verifying: fifo ... ok Verifying: devices ... ok Verifying: combo-tests ... Sub-test: xattrs + rsrc forks ... ok Sub-test: lots of metadata ... ok
So, the next thing to consider is the user interface and functionality. Arq allows you to limit the size of your rolling backups by GB or $/month in addition to limit the network traffic it uses to backup your data. Configuring your backups is also a breeze with Arq’s slick interface, you can even easily setup exclusions within your backed up folders. Additionally, Arq supports versioning and restorations from other computer backups.
Once you have configured Arq to backup what you need, its icon resides in your menu bar, and notifies you whenever backups are being transferred by adding a subtle glow to the windows on the Arq (as in a boat) icon. Arq will continue to faithfully backup your data in the background with minuscule system resources until you ask it to do something else.
Because the data you upload to S3 can be encrypted by Arq, issues of data retrievability arise. The user is locked into the software they used to backup for retrieval — so what happens if the company goes under? Fortunately, Arq’s creator Haystack Software just released an open-source tool for restoring your Arq backups: arq_restore
Using Arq has been everything I hoped it would be, and whole heartedly recommend any Mac user perform their offsite backups using it!
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I just switched to using Arq for my backups, and it’s been great – previously I was using a Drobo that had been set up to work as a Time Capsule, and was constantly running into issues mounting the backup over the network, and having my laptop do Bizarre Things when it changed networks. Arq has solved all that, and being able to configure my network settings so that it’s not slowing anyone else down is great.
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