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Comment by k1t | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with others that honesty is best, even if it hurts in the short term - there was a corresponding (perhaps even far worse) bug in the Windows version recently with no corresponding blog post or announcement.

I think it was the 5.7.8 (Windows) release that introduced a bug that caused Arq to believe a budget of 0 should be enforced. This meant if you backed up to AWS (probably others too) it would delete ALL backup records except the most recent one (and then immediately cleanup the now unreferenced objects, so even the reflog feature can't help you)

I had only been using Arq for a few months so I didn't lose anything major, but if I had been keeping years of historical records, I would be furious.

This was fixed in the next release 5.7.13 ("Fixed an issue that could cause Arq to enforce a budget when no budget was configured.") but still - I thought a bigger deal should have been made of this.

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Windows users are not that fussy. Mac users are very loud so they require special treatment.

Another way to put this would be "Mac users are accustomed to higher quality software than Windows users."

Of course, either way of putting it would be engaging in lazy stereotypes about both platforms that haven't been accurate for years, if they ever really were; so let's not.

So majority of Windows software has HiDPI support?

So the majority of software has Mac support.

I dunno, data loss from backup software seems like a pretty big fuckup.

NB: I'm a very happy Arq user; I bought it because Time Machine crapped itself every couple months requiring me to recreate the backup (a pain in it's own right: 400g over wifi) and leading to a severe loss of confidence that backups were actually going to be there if I need them. I tracked it down to Time Machine gets really unhappy if you sleep your laptop while it's in the middle of a backup. However, having to check if Time Machine is running before closing the lid or being willing to run a 1-2% chance of corrupting the backup isn't really a workable state of affairs.

In a couple years, Arq hasn't eaten my backups. It's like Time Machine except written by competent people. This situation sucks but I'm sure Stefan will add enough tests.

On a digression, this is part of my increasing frustration with how shitty Apple sourced mac software is. This tiny company beats the pants off Time Machine, even including the recent screwup.

I've noticed the same problems. Apparently it is possible to write a program that will keep the laptop from sleeping if the lid is closed. (https://www.appducate.com/2012/12/keep-laptop-awake-even-whe... is one I found, but I haven't tried it.) Given that, I wonder if it is possible to write another program that will check to see if a time machine backup is running, and keep it from sleeping until the backup is completed, after which it will sleep.

It really is incredible that a one man shop can do a better job with backup software than Apple's Time Machine. Good job, Stefan, and boo hiss to Apple engineering.

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