With Arq you can know that everything is encrypted on your computer before it hits the net, no one has access to those files, and if you really want to be secure, you can make sure you only sync to computers you have direct, physical access to and control over. government often considers itself deserving of access to any information it wants, you have to weigh the potential security risks of any cloud-based system that does not give you the only set of encryption keys. The backup format is well-documented so even if the app stops being developed, users should still be able to get their data out of the backups.Īnd in an age where the U.S. Six years of developing for the Mac gives you a good reason to trust that Arq is around for the long haul. (I highly recommend creating and storing a random encryption key using 1Password.) “Why should I trust Arq?” Arq will never ask you to enter that key into their website, because their website doesn’t have your backup information: you do, and only you. This is the part that separates Arq from other services. You will be asked to enter an encryption key. Have a NAS drive mounted via AFP that you want to backup? Backblaze won’t back that up, but Arq will. Unlike some providers, such Backblaze, you can choose any files that you want to backup. You tell it where you want to backup, you enter your credentials, and go. You can either backup to another Mac on your network or (new with version 5) backup directly to a NAS or other folder on your Mac.Īrq has announced their own cloud-based backup service but it is not yet available so I was not able to test it. If you are looking for the most reliable and least expensive solution over time, buying a 3-4 TB external drive plus Arq is probably the way to go. If you have more than one Mac (say, for example, a desktop and a laptop), it’s easy to set up Arq to backup the laptop to your desktop, and then you can backup the desktop using Arq, Backblaze, CrashPlan, and/or SuperDuper or CarbonCop圜loner. Pricing on each service can vary widely depending on how much data you want to backup and how you might need to eventually restore it. You could backup one Mac to another, or to a Synology, or to another NAS that you have physical and administrative control of, and know that it was completely secure. Those last two are especially important if you want to control your backups from end to end. Amazon Web Services including Glacier and S3.Here’s the official list of configurable destinations: Instead I recommend Arq or some other app which will backup without requiring a physical connection to your computer, like Time Machine does, and which uses something more reliable than Time Capsule. ![]() (“Better than nothing, probably,” is the nicest thing I can say about Time Machine/Capsule.) In practice, both Time Machine and Time Capsule have a lot of issues, so much so that I no longer recommend either of them. Apple tried to solve this problem with the Time Capsule, which offers the same features as Time Machine, but over the network. If you have used or seen demos of Time Machine, that is an example of versioned backups, but Time Machine only works for a drive physically connected to your computer, which is easy for desktops, but not to much for laptops.
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