

Arq 4 Beta - chmars
http://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2014/02/arq-4-beta/

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sreitshamer
A new beta will be out in a day or two with a bunch of fixes so please don't
get discouraged if you try the current beta! (I'm the author of Arq)

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coffeecheque
I love Arq 3 and have recommended it to several friends and family, but I ran
into a problem and it wasn't fixed and I've had to stop using it.

I re-installed Mac OS X Mavericks and then used Time Machine to bring my user
folder over again. I adopted the Glacier backup, and while it has worked with
some folders, it appears to want to sync my entire Library/Mail folder again.
This isn't ideal as it's 15GB+ and since the data has been uploaded once
before, I don't want to upload it again. I don't know if you can "skip" a
folder during sync, or set it to only upload files new/changed past a date.

All support said was "I'm sorry I don't have a better answer". I'm stuck now
with a Glacier full of old data and software that doesn't work. Any
suggestions?

~~~
sreitshamer
Well that's not a great support response -- I'm sorry about that.

Arq 3 is good about this when backing up to S3, but not to Glacier. It uses
the most recent backup record as its starting point and backs up new/changed
files. (When backing up to S3, it gets an object list from S3 so it knows
what's there.)

But if the most recent backup record of your Library/Mail folder has the files
in it, then it shouldn't re-upload everything. Arq backs up in 2 steps. First,
it estimates the amount to be uploaded by comparing the timestamps and other
metadata of files on disk to the most recent backup. Then it does the backup.
For each file with a different timestamp, it calculates a checksum of the
file's contents. If the contents are the same, it doesn't re-upload.

Was it really re-uploading everything?

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coffeecheque
Yeah it was. I left it for a bit and it got to 250MB, so I assumed it was
uploading Library/Mail again.

I should clarify and say support did get me to send various log files, etc. so
it wasn't a bad experience at all - it just ended with no solution.

Maybe I'll just take a loss, kill my Arq 3 backups and just re-do everything
with the new version!

Am I right in assuming that upgrading/re-imaging an Mac OS X install normally
shouldn't result in sync

~~~
javier2
I ended up with the exact same problem.

Somehow the records of my Photos folder got "lost" and completely reuploaded,
all the incremental are gone. And this was not even after I adopted an old
backup, just happened randomly. It reuploaded 15 GB before I saw what was
going on. So now my Glacier is about double the size it needed to be.

Support responded and had me send in the logfiles. I looked over the logs and
there was nothing helpful there. Sure enough support could not help me and I
am left with no solution.

This kind of stuff really makes me wary about the whole software. Strangely
enough the other folders did not see the same thing happen.

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leejoramo
Arq is a great piece of software and is part of my backup mix. (I also use
Carbon Copy Cloner, CrashPlan, rdiff-backup)

I like that Arq's restore software is open source, hopefully, Arq 4 will
continue with this.

~~~
chmars
Are you still happy with CrashPlan?

The Mac version at least is still Java-based and that comes with many
annoyances, for example high CPU usage. I can set the CPU usage to whatever I
like, it is very often around 100% (including the 'java' process). The
firewall configuration if you do not use uPnP is a problem too for more than
one Mac with CrashPlan behind the firewall.

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photoGrant
I LOVE Arq. It does everything I'd like it to, but the price increase just
burns me a little bit :( Hoping to wait out for another humble bundle or such.

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tfe
I'd like to see some upgrade pricing for owners of previous versions, rather
than paying full price every release.

~~~
sreitshamer
We've always offered upgrade pricing. Upgrade from Arq 3 to 4 will be $19.99.

~~~
tfe
Oops, my mistake. Didn't see it mentioned on the store page for Arq 3. Good to
know.

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mjmsmith
I really hope the author adds the ability to generate log files for individual
Arq backups runs. It's a great product overall, but it seems like a huge flaw
to me that it's so hard to monitor the status of backups without manually
launching the app. (I don't necessarily want an email every day, I just want
an easy way to detect if the backup has failed.)

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bruceboughton
To echo others' sentiments: I use Arq on 3 Macs and absolutely love it.

It's a bit of a pain that Amazon have no migration from the original Glacier
API to the new S3-Glacier API but I guess that's the cost of being an early
adopter.

I'll have a few terrabytes to re-upload so apologies in advance to anyone on
the Shoreditch BT hub.

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xxdesmus
Beta 4 has been very buggy in my experience (yesterday) with it. S3 backup
crashed the helper and then continued to crash the helper service. Tried a
DreamObjects backup (hooray) but that also just crashed the helper service
over and over again. That's just my experience so far.

~~~
sreitshamer
Sorry! I've got a fix, but I'm doing more testing before I ship it. (I wasn't
expecting this to be on Hacker News today)

I'll ship it hopefully tomorrow.

~~~
xxdesmus
Thank you for the reply, really looking forward to being able to backup to
DreamObjects (much cheaper than S3).

