Arq® Blog

If you use iCloud Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or a similar cloud-storage service, you’ve probably noticed that some of your files have a small cloud badge on the icon. Those are dataless files (also called cloud-only files or placeholders) — files whose metadata lives on your local disk, but whose contents live only in […]

Arq 7 now includes support for Google Cloud Storage’s “object retention lock” API. If you use Arq to back up to Google Cloud Storage, Arq can make your backups immutable for a period of time that you choose. This provides extra protection against accidental deletion and malware/ransomware. It’s very easy to set up. First, in […]

Amazon is sending out emails to Amazon Drive customers stating “Starting November 16, 2023, you will no longer be able to back up your files to Amazon Drive using Arq. Additionally, Amazon Drive will not be accessible after December 31, 2023.” Actually they’ve been emailing Amazon Drive customers for many months now warning of this. […]

If you’re using Arq 7 to connect to a macOS Ventura SFTP server and you’re getting the error “Username/PublicKey combination invalid”, it may be due to Ventura’s upgrade to OpenSSH 9.1. The release notes for OpenSSH 9.1 state: To work around this, you could edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config on the Ventura server and add this line to […]

Storj is an open-source cloud storage platform that’s been around since 2018. Why Storj? It’s different from providers like AWS, Wasabi and B2 because it’s decentralized. Your data are encrypted, split into pieces, and distributed on a global cloud network. So it’s not dependent on a single data center or region — no central point […]

As reported on Michael Tsai’s excellent site and elsewhere, if you’re on an older version of Mac OS X, you’ll encounter SSL errors due to a Let’s Encrypt root certificate that expired September 30, 2021. This includes communicating with Arq Cloud Storage servers like cloud.arqbackup.com. Arq may report this error as “The operation couldn’t be […]

Arq 7 now includes support for S3’s “object lock” API. If you use Arq to back up to a compatible storage provider, Arq can make your backups immutable for a period of time that you choose. This provides extra protection against accidental deletion and malware/ransomware. Storage options that support object lock include AWS S3, Minio, […]

We’ve made 2 utilities that are handy for testing Arq 7’s new immutable-backups feature. We share them here in case they’re handy for you too. s3delete s3delete is a command-line utility that will attempt to delete every version of every object within whatever prefix you specify. Download the binary here. To use it: Set your […]

We just added Filebase as a native storage location option in Arq 7. Filebase is S3-compatible object storage powered by blockchain. They provide an S3-compatible API to distributed storage networks Sia and Storj (more coming), taking the complexity out of storing your data on those networks. You can pay with a credit card and they […]

Cyber threats are always evolving. Immutable, encrypted backups provide the ultimate in data protection because your data can’t be destroyed or stolen no matter what ransomware attack or other bad actor does. That’s why we’re adding support for immutable backups to Arq 7. [Update 20 April 2020: Arq 7 now includes support for immutable backups. […]

Polycloud is a new cloud storage offering inexpensive object storage and increased protection from events that disrupt traditional data centers. With Polycloud you get inexpensive storage with no extra transaction fees or data transfer fees like many other providers charge. It’s geo-redundant storage for only $4/TB per month! And it’s green — they’re reusing existing […]

On Monday Jeff Barr revealed a change to Glacier pricing: 40% less for “PUT request” fees for all AWS Regions. If you backing up to Glacier with Arq, the amount you’ll pay in request fees is now 40% less. In practice this won’t be a big price difference for Arq users since Arq de-duplicates — […]

Arq 7 is here with more power to give you more control over your backups than ever before! Arq 7 is fully backward-compatible with backup data created by older versions of Arq, but it’s packed with new features. It’s been through 4+ months of internal and beta testing, so it’s solid. And it’s 50% off […]

We’re shipping Arq 7 this year. It has a totally new user interface, and all the features of Arq 6 plus additional improvements, and it’s awesome! It’s a free upgrade for Arq 6 customers, and a discounted price for Arq 5 customers. But wait, didn’t you just ship Arq 6? Yes, we did, last April. […]

Arq 6 has been out for just about a week now. Unfortunately quite a few people experienced problems with importing Arq 5 settings and data. I sincerely apologize for that. Arq 5 Compatibility We’ve removed the feature for importing Arq 5 data into Arq 6 format because of too much incompatibility between the 2 apps’ […]

Today we’re releasing Arq 6! We’re really excited about this. It’s been 4 years since Arq 5 first came out (although we’ve shipped 155 updates to Arq 5 in the meantime). Our goal with Arq 6 was to make it work with the latest operating system features and the latest cloud storage options, make it […]

Now you can store your Arq backups in your Office 365, OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint accounts! Office 365 accounts come with 1 TB of storage, so you can use it with Arq to store backups of all your files. Arq is our cloud backup app that automatically stores backups of your files, encrypted […]

Amazon Web Services announced 2 new regions, Stockholm (eu-north-1) and Osaka-Local (ap-northeast-3). Today we shipped an update to Arq that supports those regions. It’s a free update for Arq 5 customers. Just pick “Check for Updates” from Arq’s menu to get the update. Or download and run the installer from the download page. As always, […]

If you’ve got TBs of data to back up with Arq to Backblaze B2 cloud storage then their Fireball service might be just the thing for you. It’s a 96TB Synology NAS with 1GigE and 10GigE network connections. They send it to you, you fill it up and send it back, and they ingest the […]

Previously, a B2 account could only have 1 set of credentials, with full access to everything in your B2 account. Now Backblaze has added application keys, so you can create a separate set of credentials with access to only 1 bucket, for example. We’ve updated Arq in version 5.13.1 to support application keys. Configuring Arq […]

Arq can back up to any folder you want, so you could configure it to back up to a folder that lives on your NAS, but there’s a better way: use Minio! Minio is an open-source S3-compatible storage server. If you install Minio on your NAS (Synology supports Minio via Docker on many of its […]

Arq can backup NAS shares. Here’s how to set that up on a Mac. (For Windows skip to the “NAS Backup on Windows” section.) Please note: This article only applies to Arq 5. Arq 6 will take care of mounting the NAS for you. NAS Backup on Mac Arq will back up whatever folders you […]

Arq 5.11 is out for both macOS and Windows. The big change in this update is to validation. “Validation” is the process by which Arq checks that every object referenced by the latest backup record still exists at the destination, and has the correct contents. Prior to 5.11, validation happened as part of the backup […]

If you’re using Arq on a Mac, please download and run the 5.10 installer to get an update that fixes a security vulnerability (see details below). Click this link to download the installer DMG: Arq 5.10 Double-click the DMG file to open it. Double-click the Arq icon in the DMG file to install. Arq for Mac Vulnerabilities […]

Now you can back up with Arq to Backblaze’s B2 storage! It’s a super-cheap option ($.005/GB per month) for storing your backups. Arq 5.9 for Mac and Windows is a free update for all Arq 5 users. Just pick “Check for Updates” from Arq’s menu to get it. Or, if you’ve checked “automatically update Arq” […]

If you’re getting “The system cannot find the file specified” errors from Arq on Windows, it may be due to the files not being included in VSS snapshots. Arq uses Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to back up files that are open/locked. A common example is Outlook .pst and .ost files. While Arq will […]

Yesterday, as part of responding to a security incident, the Amazon Drive security team temporarily disabled API access for Arq as well as some other apps. In less than 24 hours Amazon determined that Arq was not involved in the incident, and re-enabled Arq’s API access. In a meeting yesterday Amazon folks were not able to provide […]

I hate writing blog posts like this.  In Arq 5.7.9 we changed the way Arq caches the list of objects at the destination for AWS, Google Drive and Google Cloud Storage. For those 3 destination types, all non-packed objects were stored in one “objects” directory. If you had years of backups and/or terabytes of data, […]

Amazon Web Services announced several changes on 21 December, 2016. They’ve reduced prices, they’ve expanded from 1 retrieval tier (3-5 hour delay) to 3 tiers, and they’ve replaced their confusing retrieval pricing with much simpler per-GB pricing. Price Reductions Prices for Glacier storage were reduced in most AWS regions. Prices dropped about 23% in most […]

UPDATE 3 February 2017: Amazon Web Services has replaced their confusing retrieval pricing with straightforward per-GB pricing. Read the AWS blog post and our blog post about it. For a full explanation of Glacier pricing check out our AWS Glacier Pricing article. Arq is our Mac backup app that backs up your files to your own Amazon […]

Today we released Arq 5, and we’re really excited about it! We implemented a bunch of the most-requested features, and we worked hard on improving the performance. Big Price Change With Arq 5 we’re switching from per-computer licenses to per-user licenses! Buy one license and use it on all your Macs and PCs! Way Faster […]

Yesterday Amazon Web Services announced their new Seoul region is now available. Today we shipped an update to Arq for both Mac and Windows that supports it! It’s a free update for Arq 4 customers. If you’re already using Arq 4, pick “Check for Updates” from Arq’s menu to install Arq 4.4 (Windows) or 4.15 (Mac). If not, […]

If you receive an email from Amazon Web Services with the title “Time to remove or rotate your AWS access keys” it’s because you’ve got root access keys in your account that are more than a year old, and Amazon wants you to remove them. If you’re using Arq to back up your files to AWS, you […]

If you’re backing up to Amazon Web Services with Arq, you’ll need a “key pair” consisting of an “access key ID” (the public key, like a username) and a “secret access key” (the private key, like a password). You could create a root key pair with permission for everything, but AWS prefers that you create […]

You can now store your encrypted Arq backups in your own Amazon Cloud Drive account! Amazon Cloud Drive includes unlimited storage for $59.99/year, so you can back up everything. Amazon provides a web interface to upload and download files, but Arq uses its API to upload directly to the cloud. Arq is our cloud backup solution that encrypts […]

Last night at the SpiceWorks “unplugged” event in Boston, 4 local IT managers sat on a panel and answered audience questions about buying products. It was really helpful for me, as I’ve been wondering whether selling to corporate IT folks is totally different from what I’ve been doing so far with Arq, our online backup […]

The other day Wendy emailed me because Things crashed and she lost a lot of work, and she couldn’t figure out how to get back her data using Arq. We traded a few emails over the next few hours, but it quickly became clear to me that she wasn’t wasn’t comfortable digging into her Library […]

No. For a bootable backup we recommend SuperDuper. Arq is complementary to SuperDuper; SuperDuper creates a bootable backup on another hard drive, and Arq creates versioned backups online. Duplicate Backup A bootable backup is a duplicate of your hard drive. It’s great if you need to get up and running very quickly in the event […]

Arq 4.10 is now available, and it includes support for backing up to Google’s just-announced “nearline” storage! Google’s new nearline storage is excellent for backups. Nearline pricing is super-cheap, like Amazon’s Glacier, but without Glacier’s hassles and confusing restore fee structure. Uploading is free. Downloading (if you need to restore) is $.12/GB for data transfer plus $.01/GB nearline-retrieval fee. If you’re already paying for […]