A while back, in the post “Backups for the Concerned”, I shared my choice for cloud backups. Over the time since then, and not once or even twice, I had to actually use this backup, and the size of what I’ve backed up to date exceeds 3TB. So in practice I can confirm — Arq does indeed work.
Since then, I recommend it to everyone who asks. As experience has shown, despite its somewhat inhuman laconicism, this program can be used not only by hardcore geeks, but also by quite ordinary people. My colleagues, for example, are quite happy with it, though some of them are far from computer wizards and use their Macs as “workstations” for data processing.
One pleasant thing about this program is that the author actively supports it. Various updates and fixes come out all the time, though over the past couple of years I haven’t observed any critical problems — it just works. And it’s doubly pleasant that today v5 came out, which works like v4, but better and faster.
I’ve been living with this version for a couple of weeks now. The author gave me early access, so I had time to test this beast in practice. From the very beginning, my relationship with v5 didn’t work out. One of my main backup clouds is Google Drive and there were a number of strange problems with it. Of course, I didn’t keep quiet and in a couple of days the author and I managed to fix everything I found. So today I have no particular complaints about version 5 and I can safely recommend it to all those who listen to my recommendations.
For the question “what’s new there?” there’s an answer on the arq site. If you’re interested in what it can do in general, you can find that out too. To be honest, there doesn’t seem to be much new on the surface, everything is pretty much as it was, however this new arq is genuinely faster. I didn’t conduct scientific experiments with a stopwatch and can’t confirm how the 6x speed improvement affects real speed, but it’s much, and noticeably faster! Orders of magnitude faster than before.
Besides speed, arq v5 feels more lightweight. First of all, even at peak activity it doesn’t consume as much CPU as before, and moreover, it no longer creates such large caches on your disk. I complained to the author about this in the past, because spending 40-50GB of disk space to backup 3TB seemed excessive to me. Not that it’s such a big problem in my case, when it’s a fusion drive and it’s large, but if you have your system on a small SSD where every bit counts, then it could be much more noticeable. Now this cache has noticeably shrunk and mine has grown to more modest sizes over 2 weeks. It’s hard to say how it will be over time, but according to the author everything is now much better with this. Despite the fact that this cache is smaller, in my opinion it’s still excessive. I just spoke with the author and he seems to know what the issue is and promised to fix everything and minimize the cache to reasonable limits.
Another new useful feature is backup search. You can enter a file name or part of it in the search bar and get everything it backed up on that topic. And of course you can restore right on the spot. The search is quite reasonable even with my volumes, though it could be faster.
If you like getting emails from robots, the new arq can report details by email. What, where, how much and who benefits from it. Personally, such reports don’t particularly interest me and the only thing I allowed it was to send error messages, which were already in the previous version.
Well, and lastly — its license is now more humane and compatible with how programs are sold in the app store. That is, having bought a license you can use it on any number of machines. And yes, not sure since when this appeared, but it seems to work on Windows too, though I haven’t checked it myself. The site says “Buy one license and use it on all your Macs and PCs!” so maybe it will also suit users of the-most-popular-os.
The price is $49.99 and although at first glance this looks like “ouch” and even “steep”, the program is worth it. Let the author earn his bread and butter and continue to develop and maintain his product to everyone’s delight.
This post was translated from the Russian original with AI assistance and reviewed by a human.