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maukdaddy

Arq (https://www.arqbackup.com) and AWS. As close to set it and forget it that you can get.

Process:

- Local TimeMachine backups

- Arq backup to AWS Glacier

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Note that Arq with Glacier only is usually a mistake (as discovered by the poster below), since restores need to be requested and queued up, and take hours to come back with the results. Restores are also very expensive.

As an Arq user who used Glacier previously, I much rather recommend using Google Cloud Storage:

* Nearline restore is instantaneous;

* Storage per month is >30% cheaper [1];

* Recovering data from GCS is super cheap; about 3% (!) of equivalent Glacier costs.

For the super paranoid, GCS also has more expensive multi-region buckets.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/pricing/tco/storage-nearline

Arq also supports Amazon Cloud Drive as a target, and if you're in the US, it's a flat $60 per year for unlimited storage.

Anyone doing this? Sounds like something that will be banned once it catches on, but also sounds good.

There are some Terms of Service [1] items that might come and back and bite you (or not — who knows, they're a bit vague):

    The Service is offered in the United States. We may 
    restrict access from other locations. There may be
    limits on the types of content you can store and 
    share using the Service, such as file types we 
    don't support, and on the number or type of devices
    you can use to access the Service.

The fact that they "may restrict access from other locations" could be a problem when you travel.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/is-amazons-online-storage-reall...

I used to use Arq but i wanted to pull a single 1KB file off it from a computer sitting next to me and the ETA I got was around 90 minutes. I deleted Arq and its backups after that.

If you used Arq with AWS's Glacier, that is not Arq's fault, but AWS's; Glacier is designed to be (extremely-)high-latency.

If you want low-latency restores, see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000979. I've restored small, individual files with Arq + GCS several times, and each time takes just a few seconds.

All the other storage targets that Arq supports (Dropbox, S3, SFTP, Google Drive, etc.) should also be very fast to restore from.

Should, yes. My restore from SFTP over a LAN was going to be about 90 minutes.

I've never used SFTP with Arq. Did you investigate it any further? I'm sure the author would love a bug report.

I heard a lot of horror stories when people tried to get back data from Glacier so I decided that I'll use simply S3. Aren't you afraid of Glacier?

I consider Glacier as the final offsite backup in the event my apartment burns down or something terrible happens to all of my local backups. In that case I don't care about how long it might take to restore - I will throttle the recovery as needed to not blow the AWS budget.

Arq + Dropbox

I used to back up to Glacier but I was already paying for Dropbox so I moved everything there.

Can you elaborate on the speed of backup restores with Dropbox? I'm also paying for Dropbox and planning to start using it as a backup destination with arq.

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