sreitshamer

My favorite is "Software development isn't a code production activity, it's a knowledge acquisition activity."

(Arq developer here) Haven't gotten many requests for it at all over the years. I presume it's because there are so many free options for Linux.

(Arq developer here) By default Arq tries to be unobtrusive. Edit your backup plan and slide the “CPU usage” slider all the way to the right to make it go faster.

Software development isn't a code-production activity, it's a knowledge-acquisition activity. It involves refactoring and deleting code too. I guess the AI isn't helping with that?

Is there a way to mount the sqlite tables as a filesystem?

Arq stores the data in content-addressable format. Arq's data format is documented here: https://www.arqbackup.com/documentation/arq7/English.lproj/d...

Arq manages the restore process, telling AWS to make Glacier/Deep Archive objects "downloadable", waiting for them to become downloadable, and then downloading the data.

I think maybe you're referring to the original Glacier vault model? Nowadays you can put objects in an S3 bucket (with your own object name and metadata) and set the storage class to Glacier Flexible Retrieval or Glacier Deep Archive. Then you can use the S3 APIs to get object lists etc. Also, they got rid of the insane "peak hourly request fee" stuff when downloading. https://www.arqbackup.com/blog/amazon-glacier-pricing-change...

I'm confused by this comment. Arq can store your backups in your own AWS account, using Glacier Deep Archive storage class. It's your own AWS account, so you pay exactly the Deep Archive price.

Not sure when you last looked into Glacier, but they did away with the "peak hourly request" fee which could be insane if you restored data too quickly. Pricing is much more reasonable now. You still have to wait hours to download your data, but Glacier deep archive is about $.001/GB per month for storage and about $0.29/GB to download (plus some transaction fees that aren't usually significant).

Google Cloud's Archive tier is cheapest to store at about $1.23/TB per month, but downloading is very expensive.

Not sure what you mean by "trying the saas way of things". We still sell Arq 7 as a standalone app. It comes with a year of updates. You can choose to renew, or not and keep using the app you bought forever. Similar licensing to Panic's Nova app https://www.arqbackup.com/documentation/arq7/English.lproj/a...

You could also make the Arq backups in your S3 bucket immutable, for more ransomware protection.

Console is sluggish for me, but S3 (us-east-1) seems to work fine.

There's no need to edit the backup plan. As I wrote in the reddit thread, clear the cache and do a backup. Sorry it's not more clear.

Are you maybe referring to Glacier "vaults" (the original Glacier API)? With the old Glacier Vault API you had to initiate an "inventory-retrieval" job with an SNS topic etc. It took days. Painful.

But these days you can store objects in an S3 bucket and specify the storage class as "GLACIER" for "S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval" (or "GLACIER_IR" for S3 Glacier Immediate Retrieval or "DEEP_ARCHIVE" for S3 Glacier Deep Archive). You can use the regular S3 APIs. We haven't seen any rate limiting on this approach.

The only difference from the "online" storage classes like STANDARD, STANDARD_IA, etc is that downloading an object with GLACIER/GLACIER_IR/DEEP_ARCHIVE storage class requires first making it downloadable by calling the S3 "restore" API on it, and then waiting until it's downloadable (1-5 minutes for GLACIER_IR, 3-5 hours for GLACIER, and 5-12 hours for DEEP_ARCHIVE).

The "back up and validate" function only downloads all the data if you're using a storage location that doesn't provide checksums (SFTP or NAS/folder). So, it shouldn't be downloading very much if you're using it with OneDrive. Please email support@arqbackup.com so we can follow up on this. Thanks.

Arq 7 uses the Microsoft Graph API, the one we're supposed to use now.

A “you’re about to be charged” email would be friendlier and give the customer a feeling of more control. That’s what we do. (We of course will also refund the charge if you email us after it happens.)

(I make Arq, a backup app that supports S3's object-lock API for immutable backups). I can't see how to do incremental backups without using the private key to read the previous backup record. Can you explain how that would work?

Arq will encrypt/decrypt the backup data with a key that never leaves your computer. The encryption and data format are documented here: https://www.arqbackup.com/documentation/arq7/English.lproj/d...

(Developer behind Arq here) Nowadays many folks have lots of free cloud space in Google Drive/Dropbox/OneDrive and use Arq to store their versioned encrypted backups there, which makes restoring/downloading free.

Or stored an a cloud storage provider that supports S3-style object lock.

Arq doesn't write recognizable filenames to B2, just checksum-based object identifiers, so it's not an issue for Arq backup data stored at B2.

Panic has a really nice approach with their Nova app. They keep updating it all the time; you pay once and get free updates for a year. You can choose at checkout time to stay updated for 50% of new-purchase price each year, or you can choose to pay for a new year of updates later on, when/if you need/want it. https://library.panic.com/nova/purchase-faq/

In the course of building that data compatibility, our plans changed, we think for the better. We wrote about it here: https://www.arqbackup.com/blog/next-up-arq-7/

I'm sorry you feel support isn't responsive. We aim to answer emails within 1 business day, as we always have. We've added staff to do this.

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.

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.

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.

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.

mailinabox ftw. After the first couple of months I've had zero delivery problems.