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Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

Oh, man. No, just no.

Arq 5 was OK.

Arq 6 was shipped in a state that wasn't suitable even for beta. It corrupted and destroyed backups created with previous versions, couldn't complete new backups, wasn't working in fresh installs, had no documentation, no development plan and very poor communication from the dev addressing all these issues. The lash back was so bad that they closed their Twitter account and locked up Arq subreddit (only to claim later that it wasn't them, but Reddit itself that did that).

A lot of people, me included, were expecting Arq 6 with a great deal of excitement only to witness one of the greatest dumpster fires in the recent history of ISVs. The news now is that they decided to just bury Arq 6 without trying to fix it and move on to Arq 7 - https://www.arqbackup.com/blog/next-up-arq-7/

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I'm very sorry you had that experience. I feel really terrible about it. It's been an extremely stressful 5 months so far.

I tried to communicate the best I could about what we were doing -- a blog post, responding to all the reddit comments on the arqbackup subreddit that somebody else controls, answering thousands of emails. For at least a week I answered 300+ emails/day while simultaneously trying to diagnose and fix the issues people were experiencing.

At one point I deleted the Twitter account because I couldn't cope psychologically with all the hate and the personal attacks.

We set about immediately working to make Arq 6.3 "backward-compatible" with old Arq data (rather than import it into the new format, which failed unexpectedly for quite a few people).

A month into it we tried making a UI that's "native" (like Arq 5) and realized we like it better too. So, we missed our June 30 deadline of making Arq 6 backward compatible, and decided to just start over with a native UI.

We were going to ship that as Arq 6.3, but a few weeks ago realized that just shipping it as a point release would be way too disruptive. So it's going to be Arq 7. Arq 6 users of course will be upgraded to Arq 7 for free.

I know we screwed up. We're trying really, really hard to make it right. We promptly refunded every single purchase for which a refund was requested. It's not about the money. It's about trying to do the right thing.

I don't know what else to do at this point. If you have suggestions please let me know.

> bury Arq 6 without trying to fix it

I don't understand this. Arq 7 is the fix for the Arq 6 issues. It's free for Arq 6 users. We're not trying to bury anything. We've been really open about saying we screwed up and we're doing all we can to fix it.

Stefan, I realize that you've been under a massive amount of stress. I've been through really badly screwed up roll-outs myself, while being on a small team. I can relate.

The issue with the Arq 6 release was not that it was bad per se, but that there was no clear _public_ communication from you. This was twice as jarring because in recent years you've been making comments to the effect that it was no longer just you, but a team. So not hearing anything official for days, if not weeks following such a disastrous release cost you a great deal of goodwill. For every email you got, there were 10 people who didn't bother to send one.

The hate and personal attacks you were seeing were a side-effect of that. The rule of thumb for when you screw up is that you _must_ talk to people. Tell them, verbosely, what's happening on your end, what caused this, what you do to prevent the same from happening again. Talk like a chatter box. As shallow as it may sound, this shows people that you are on top of the things and it builds sympathy. All you have to do is to demonstrate that you are feeling the pain and working to resolve it. Once there's a critical mass of users that are supportive of your recovery efforts, it will prevent others from turning into trolls and haters.

Talk to your users.

You weren't doing this, not in public. That was the main issue with Arq 6 release. Not that you screwed up.

OK. I'm sorry you got the impression that I didn't communicate. I answered a shitload of tweets and emails in the days/weeks following the launch. I apologized thousands of times. I scrambled to fix issues at the same time.

At some point I think I had some sort of breakdown and could no longer cope.

I'm trying to recover here. But every time somebody mentions Arq, someone seems to come along and make a comment like your above comment, which makes me want to throw in the towel frankly.

I bust my ass day after day to try to do the right thing because I believe that what you put out into the world is what you get back. I hope in the longer run that's true.

Support is an enormous time drain and one-on-one support, be it over email or Twitter, is worse yet.

You should really consider doing everything possible to move support from 1-to-1 interactions to 1-to-many. A couple of simple things will go a long way - open up a forum and add an FAQ page.

Right now you don't have a place on the website where users with issues can go. If someone runs into a problem, they will be looking for the problem description, not documentation. The only option is to either send an email, which is slow, or to use Twitter, since you appear to be responsive there. It's literally the least effective setup as far as managing the support load goes.

Once you have a self-serve support options set up, you can funnel all support queries to the FAQ page first and to the official forum second. Redirect all Twitter and Reddit queries to the forum and answer them there. Do not engage in any support conversations on Twitter and Reddit at all. Chit-chat is OK, but no support talk. Keep an eye on what's the actual FAQs are and populate the FAQ based on that. In a matter of weeks you should see the time spent on support go down dramatically.

You'll get through this. Arq still got the momentum and the vast majority of Arq users are loyal. They still wish Arq well. I know I do.

Interesting, thank you. I have been using Arq 5 without issues and was not aware of this.

Did you try Arq 7 at all? People have been happy about it so far. If you're willing to give it a try and provide feedback, I'd be very grateful.

As an Arq 5 user, should I wait until Arq 7 is officially released?

It's up to you. We hope to officially release Arq 7 by the end of the year. It seems to be very stable already according to the feedback we've gotten so far.

Thank you. I was mainly curious if the migration from 5 to 6 (or 7) was smooth now.

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