During this review, we’ll be taking a look at, a desktop solution available for both Windows and Mac. Arq provides a measure of versatility that you won’t find with all-in-one options like Backblaze, letting you turn cloud storage services like Dropbox and OneDrive into a backup provider, much like Cloudwards.net favorite does. However, compared to the features and look described in our, Arq falls a little short.

• Arqbackup.com Website. Cloud Backup For Mac

While certainly capable of getting the job done, Arq comes across as dated and won’t appeal to many users. If that includes you, we’d recommend checking our roundup for some niftier ideas. Otherwise, keep reading to find out what Arq Backup is all about. Alternatives for Arq Backup. Arq provides a backup client that can be used with several different storage options, including some of our, like. That lets you turn ordinary cloud storage into online backup, taking advantage of Arq’s automatic backup scheduling, encryption, de-duplication and restore capabilities. The client handles backup reasonably well and doesn’t limit the size or type of files you can backup.

However, it takes a bit more work to manage than a more consumer-friendly tool like Backblaze (check out our for more on that), and hasn’t nearly as many features as CloudBerry Backup or Duplicati, both of which take a similar, agnostic “choose-your-own storage” approach. Missing features include disk-image backup and mobile capabilities.

Arq software can be purchased for a one-time fee of $49.95. This will grant you a lifetime, transferable license that can be used for your computer or server. You can try the service out for free for 30 days, too. It’s important to understand that Arq doesn’t come with any online backup space. This will be a separate purchase that will likely require a monthly or annual subscription. Far from being a con, however, this approach actually provides Arq with a good deal more flexibility than all-in-one online backup options like Carbonite and IDrive. There are eight cloud options available at the moment: Amazon Drive, Amazon S3/Glacier, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Cloud, Backblaze B2, OneDrive and Wasabi and any S3-compatible server.

You can also backup to your NAS device or a file server if you want to keep a backup on site. While the selection will probably suit most users just fine, it’s not nearly as impressive as the fifty-plus available with CloudBerry Backup. A CloudBerry Backup desktop license is also cheaper, costing just $29.99.

Arq desktop clients are available for Windows and Mac. Installation only takes a minute. When you start it up, Arq will walk you through the basic steps of setting up your backup plan, though many settings will need to be tweaked later on. The tool itself is pretty straightforward if you have some technical knowledge, but it does feel somewhat like a relict of the past (think 1995).

It certainly won’t win any beauty awards. If you really don’t want to work to maintain your backup plan, you’d be better off going with a service like, neither of which require that you configure your own storage. Or, if you like the idea of picking and configuring your own storage, CloudBerry Backup gives you more options, is more user friendly and looks much prettier. One issue we discovered with the tool is that the edit destination pane was too big for our computer screen, causing some of the options to scrunched. There’s no way to change the size so that it will appear in screen and there isn’t a vertical scroll option to move down, either, so we weren’t able to alter our “budget” settings (see image, below). Arq doesn’t have any mobile apps for accessing your data. File Backup & Restoration.

After you install Arq, the first thing it will ask you to do is select a backup destination. As mentioned, there are eight different cloud storage options available that you can select from. SFTP backup to your own server is another option, as is backup to an external drive. For our tests, we set up a backup plan using Amazon S3.

To do that, we had to generate security credentials for our S3 account. If you’d like to learn how to do that, we have a guide you can check out. The wizard then prompts us to create a storage bucket on one of the many Amazon S3 servers.

Afterwards, you’ll need to set up an encryption password. This is a private password that only you know. As such, if you forget it, you’ll lose access to your backup. Arq automatically selects the C drive to backup. However, you can choose additional folders and change your backup schedule if you want to. You can add exclusions to your backup by file or folder name, including file extension. Backups are run every hour by default and are run incrementally, so only changes since the last backup are processed.

You can alter the schedule from the destinations preferences pane by double-clicking on your destination. You choose to back based on a set duration, back once a day a specific time or only run manual backups. From the advanced preferences pane, you can also select an option called “thin backups from hourly to daily to weekly.” By doing so, Arq will save all of your hourly backups for the last 24 hours, all of your daily backups from the past month and weekly backups. Arq automatically performs de-duplication when backing up so that the same file content isn’t stored multiple times. You can restore files by using the restore hierarchy on the left side. Your files will appear in the center pane. Select what you want and click the “restore” button near the bottom.

Arc also lets you restore previous versions of files. All previous versions of files are stored, which is great. There’s no way to create a versioning policy, but storing that many versions shouldn’t be an issue because Arq processes backups incrementally, only copying the parts of files that changed rather than the entire file. Arq lets you set up private encryption so that your files are scrambled prior to leaving your computer and are decrypted until your restore them. That way, no matter what storage provider you decide to use, that provider will never be able to read or scan your files.

The level of encryption used is 256-bit AES. Beyond that, the level of security and privacy you get will depend on the storage provider you choose. All of the options available store data on in designed to withstand natural disasters and physical and virtual attacks. So, you data should be pretty safe regardless of whichever you choose. Support for Arq can be obtained by email Arq states that it tries to answer all requests within one business day. We put that to the test by emailing a few test questions to Arq support. Responses were received within the allotted timeframe, even on a Saturday.

There are no live support options for Arq, even for business customers. However, the quick response times should get most issues resolved quickly. Support for storage issues will go through your preferred cloud service, anyway. Arq does have a documentation center if you prefer to figure things out on yourself. However, there are only a handful of articles and no search option. Those articles that are available are well done, though, with straightforward instructions and screenshots. It’s hard to shake the impression that Arq was designed entirely by an engineer.

It has that certain utilitarian look. Isn’t a particularly bad backup tool, but there are far better options out there: we recommend any novice user check out our for an overview. For a tool with similar capabilities, that’s CloudBerry Backup. If you’re a Mac user, check out our article on. If you really want to take full advantage of the cloud, and are both much better options that will likely cost you less money, once the price of storage is factored in. We’d love to hear from our readers on their own Arq experiences, good or bad, so please feel free to hit us up in the comments below. And, as always, thanks for reading.

I’ve been trying Arq as a possible replacement for CrashPlan. I’m probably going to abandon it, hoping that Cloudberry will serve my needs better. Arq makes a big deal about using a standard backup format. I don’t know whether this means that other cloud backup programs can read its archives. I’d be interested in comments on this. Your feature list for Arq says “Keeps deleted files: 30”. I suggest that you list this in the Cons section at the top.

You noted problems with a window too large for a small screen. I had a different problem with fixed size windows. I usually run my Windows display magnification at 125%. This caused clipping, and forced me to adjust some settings blindly using tab and enter. Support response was “Arq does not support display scaling on Windows”. This fits your “looks like 1995” judgement: no scrolling or resizing. Scheduling of local and cloud backups play poorly together.

If the cloud backup takes weeks (and mine was going to), no other backup runs in the mean time. I set the pause option on the cloud backup to give my local backup a chance to run, but it turns out that the pause option, despite being in the destination options, is actually an application option and does not permit a different backup to start. Support could only suggest “periodically stop Arq” to allow the local backup. This of course is unacceptable, since it can result in files not being backed up for weeks. Manual action for backups is completely unacceptable.

(My rule: Backup Is Boring, and won’t happen if you have to think about it.) Arq cannot sent email notifications using the usual port 465, even though a mail client on the same computer was using this port. Instead, Arq requires port 587. Support did provide this information. However, not all providers accept this port for SMTP: fastmail.com does, but yahoo.com does not.

After a sequence of reconfiguring the backup schedule, ArqAgent started using 100% of one CPU. Support response was “set the log level to Debug, then” email the log file. Of course I could not do the latter, since the problem, though serious, was not reproducible. Applications should by default maintain information to diagnose major problems (though failure to do so is common). I use Arq because there are no alternatives, but I am not happy with it. I have a problem with Arq using 100% of a core. They claim to be windows native, but that is not true.

Its a.Net application. The open source code was created by Arq, so its really just public documentation of their proprietary format. The other negative is that it scans for file changes which can take 15 minutes and peg a CPU core, and has no real-time support. So scheduling once per hour is just a resource hog. I have to schedule at 4 hour intervals.

I’ve been using Arq on our Macs for about 10 years. Arq has grown their service markedly since the early days and the customer support is beyond excellent. I’m currently backing up three Macs to a Dropbox account. I’ve tried multiple other services including BackBlaze, Spider Oak, Carbonite, etc. Some offer a few features that I’d like to see in Arq, but I’ve always returned to Arq (actually, never left it, just trialed the others). Pricing is more than reasonable, and although I’ve only had a few questions or concerns over the years, they were addressed by Arq support immediately.

That means a lot in my book. If you’re looking for a lot of “eye candy” in an application you may be disappointed. I’m more impressed with what works and works well and is professionally supported. I can highly recommend Arq. Thanks for the input, RSA.

I probably gave ARQ too cursory a look because the design looks about 30 years old. I’ll consider taking another look at it. Certainly, some of the providers you’ve mentioned – SpiderOak, Carbonite and even Backblaze – have some speed issues. Have you tried CloudBerry Backup? It’s a bit like Arq in that it’s a “choose-your-own-cloud” backup provider, with support for Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, Azure and about fifty other services. It has quite a few more features than Arq, too.

Check out our review (there’s a free trial): I’ll look at giving Arq another look, myself. Best of luck.

I'm reading this post: some guy realized he couldn't restore from backup. I read the whole thread but i'm still not clear: is running validation enough to prevent this problem from happening? I just ran validation on my wasabi and local drive backups.

Arq is not very explicit about what's happening during the validation. Did it have to re-upload a few files?

Are my files OK? That's the sort of stuff i'd like to know. When I used crashplan, I didn't think much of backup validation, I just trusted the system 100%. Now that i'm thinking about it, i'd like to really have the peace of mind of knowing my backup can be restored when I need it. Any thoughts on how to achieve this? ​ ​. Tl;dr: Do test restores, and use more than one backup methodology.

I used to just use CrashPlan for everything (personally) and trust it 100%. The product never failed me, but as you know the company sort of pulled the rug out from under me on that one. Thus, now I use Arq to my storage server locally, Backblaze for cloud storage, and a straight up regular file copy to a couple of offline drives. If any company or product ceases to exist or function when I need it, I have two others on which I can rely.

As to ensuring reliability, the only reliable way to test backup integrity is to do test restores as often as you feel you need to. Backups are not a 'set it and forget it' product and of you treat it that way you run bigger risk of being burned. Some products (like Veeam) have a function where it boots up your virtual machine from the backup, tests that it functions, shuts it down, and emails you the report. It's called SureBackup. Even with something like this, I would to test restores. As an example, a client I had in the past had Veeam backups locally, and a replication to an offsite datacenter.

Every month, we did a test restore of a few random files (both from recent recovery points and also older ones). Every six months to a year, we did a test restore of everything from local storage. This restore was used to update and wipe clean their test and development environment, so it wasn't a completely regular schedule depending on that was going on at the time. The offsite datacenter was just implemented when I left the company, so I dint know what the testing schedule there was.

Between this and the occasional need for a file restored for a user, we were confident in the backups. I know it's probably impractical to do a test restore of everything you have on account of time and storage limitations. Myself, I do a test restore if a few random files every now and then. I make sure to pick some from the newest restore point, some from the middle of the chain, and some from the oldest available.

Arqbackup.com Website. Cloud Backup For Mac

That way I am also confident that if a file gets corrupted and I don't notice for a month, it's likely I cna get it back from an older version in the backup. In a few words: no, not completely. For many of the same reasons you created this post. I don't know what precisely it's doing, how it validates stuff, what it does if it finds issues, what it even defines as an issue, if/how it repairs them, and I don't get any sort of report about these actions unless I dig into the program logs. (Admittedly I don't have any email reports set up. I should do that.) I notice that the validation also appears to be a manual-only process? Or at least, I see nowhere in particular that I can configure it to run automatically on a schedule.

(EDIT: It turns out that it does.) ​ Do I trust that the validation process does whatever it's supposed to do and helps ensure the integrity of my backups? Yes I do, otherwise I'd not have purchased Arq. Do I trust it enough to not bother with other backup methods and manually verifying the backups using test restores? Nope, not a chance. There are so many things that could go wrong, even if I do trust the program it's wise to manually verify. My home server may have a failing drive that's resulting in corrupt data, for example.

The source of the backups (my original files) may have problems. An accurate/valid backup of a corrupt file is still a corrupt file when you restore it. I've been burned enough times at work (clients often don't want to spend enough money and effort on backups until they learn that lesson the hard way) that I know to double check and verify everything. To me, nothing replaces manual verification.

​ I'll always do test restores. One of my backups will always be a plain old literal copy of my important files on an external drive. (An encrypted external drive presently, but still). No software involved. Offline and immune to hackers and viruses and so on.

Hi, I work on Arq Backup. Sorry there isn't more documentation on Arq's validation process. Validation checks the latest backup record. It makes sure that each object referenced by the latest backup record still exists at the destination and has the correct contents. Validation happens every 60 days by default.

It keeps a database of when it last checked each object's contents, and will only re-check an individual object if it hasn't been checked in 180 days. You can change the 60-day interval on both Mac and Windows.

Pick 'Preferences' from Arq's menu, Destinations tab, and double-click your destination. Change the value for 'Validate backup data every days'.

As an aside: Have you ever looked at the license agreement and terms of service for backup software? You will notice that in there they have a disclaimer of warranty and liability - they literally state that they're not responsible for any damage that their software causes to computer systems, data, or businesses. ​ Try talking to backup vendors - any backup vendors - and ask for a legally binding guarantee for the security of your data. You won't get one.

They don't trust themselves to make that guarantee. That's why the best practice is multiple methods, to multiple places, and manually verifying integrity. ​ The same is true of security/anti-virus vendors - ask for a guarantee of security, or evidence of any viruses or breaches that can be used to prosecute someone in court.

You won't get that, either. For the longest time Microsoft's EULA included permission for MS to enter your premises at any time to verify compliance. (Or so a former boss told me, because he claims to have read it.) I have heard that as well, and even though I've read more EULAs for different reasons at different times than I care to remember, I honestly just don't remember if it included that specific language. What I can say is Microsoft has done licensing audits of customers, but that's usually enterprise customers and there are different agreements in place that are a bit more formal than a general software EULA.