I really want something that ends with a full disk image that's easy to restore to a new device, runs backups on a schedule (and will run a while after the next boot if the computer is off at the scheduled time), writes the images to a unix system on the LAN (either directly, or by writing to SMB), and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
Doesn't provide a perfect full disk image, but it does store everything I need. I've done one full restore from them (fried motherboard from a power surge) and it went as smoothly as I could expect.
[0] https://twitter.com/zetafleet/status/1304664097989054464
Another point, I suppose that backblaze comes with dedup and compression?
Re dedup/compression, it's a bit irrelevant because their plans are unmetered.
[0] https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664688-Can-y...
...until you need to restore from backup. You then have to sign in on the Backblaze website and enter that key, the files you are trying to restore are then decrypted on their end, and bundled up and sent to you.
They say that the key is only ever in RAM, and only then briefly.
However, another option is to back up just the data and reinstall the OS + programs in case of a disaster. I've been set up this way for nearly a decade, now using Bvckup 2 [3] as a replicator. This is faster and lighter on the system and it creates backups that are readily accessible.
[1] https://www.veeam.com/windows-endpoint-server-backup-free.ht...
Up until now I've been manually doing it via 7zip. But doing it manually is so unreliable that it doesn't even count. Or using Macrium, but it always felt like overkill.
Bvckup2's archive/keep eveything feature for handling deletions is really great!
Someone else in this thread mentioned Duplicati, which also looks really great. I might add that to my backup flow. I thought it was you, but now I can't find it anywhere in the thread. I guess they either delted or edited their comment.
I also have bvckup2 (worth buying almost for the amazing UI alone) but I use it more for syncing some folders to and from a NAS.
I've used to restore twice: same machine and new machine. Worked without an issue once the USB boot is created.
I think the cost is reasonable for 5 workstations.
Had a SSD die on me a few years ago, the primary disk. With no warning it just bricked itself. Thanks to Acronis my computer was running again less than an hour later.
Have also used it to restore documents and similar I accidentally deleted.
Another nice feature they have is their malware protection service. It detects programs modifying a large number of files in a relatively short amount of time, blocks them until you say if it's ok or not.
Arq 5 was OK.
Arq 6 was shipped in a state that wasn't suitable even for beta. It corrupted and destroyed backups created with previous versions, couldn't complete new backups, wasn't working in fresh installs, had no documentation, no development plan and very poor communication from the dev addressing all these issues. The lash back was so bad that they closed their Twitter account and locked up Arq subreddit (only to claim later that it wasn't them, but Reddit itself that did that).
A lot of people, me included, were expecting Arq 6 with a great deal of excitement only to witness one of the greatest dumpster fires in the recent history of ISVs. The news now is that they decided to just bury Arq 6 without trying to fix it and move on to Arq 7 - https://www.arqbackup.com/blog/next-up-arq-7/
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.
The issue with the Arq 6 release was not that it was bad per se, but that there was no clear _public_ communication from you. This was twice as jarring because in recent years you've been making comments to the effect that it was no longer just you, but a team. So not hearing anything official for days, if not weeks following such a disastrous release cost you a great deal of goodwill. For every email you got, there were 10 people who didn't bother to send one.
The hate and personal attacks you were seeing were a side-effect of that. The rule of thumb for when you screw up is that you _must_ talk to people. Tell them, verbosely, what's happening on your end, what caused this, what you do to prevent the same from happening again. Talk like a chatter box. As shallow as it may sound, this shows people that you are on top of the things and it builds sympathy. All you have to do is to demonstrate that you are feeling the pain and working to resolve it. Once there's a critical mass of users that are supportive of your recovery efforts, it will prevent others from turning into trolls and haters.
Talk to your users.
You weren't doing this, not in public. That was the main issue with Arq 6 release. Not that you screwed up.
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.
You should really consider doing everything possible to move support from 1-to-1 interactions to 1-to-many. A couple of simple things will go a long way - open up a forum and add an FAQ page.
Right now you don't have a place on the website where users with issues can go. If someone runs into a problem, they will be looking for the problem description, not documentation. The only option is to either send an email, which is slow, or to use Twitter, since you appear to be responsive there. It's literally the least effective setup as far as managing the support load goes.
Once you have a self-serve support options set up, you can funnel all support queries to the FAQ page first and to the official forum second. Redirect all Twitter and Reddit queries to the forum and answer them there. Do not engage in any support conversations on Twitter and Reddit at all. Chit-chat is OK, but no support talk. Keep an eye on what's the actual FAQs are and populate the FAQ based on that. In a matter of weeks you should see the time spent on support go down dramatically.
You'll get through this. Arq still got the momentum and the vast majority of Arq users are loyal. They still wish Arq well. I know I do.
- Unison was a command line tool, like a better rsync, designed for backups. But it feels quite kludgy doing backups/restores from the command line in Windows.
- DriveImageXML not only backed everything up, but created an XML file listing what was backed up where, so in the event you didn't have the software to restore stuff, you could still conceivably recover it (if you could write something to parse the XML and extract). It worked well, though it was slow. It got me through a few computer changes, and I had no problems restoring.
- Windows' built-in backup software worked really nice until you upgraded and then wanted to restore something from a backup made in a previous version. Being able to restore is kind of critical though.
- One of my employers required us to use a cloud backup solution which I won't name, but it was about as heavy as having McAfee Antivirus or similar on your system wasting most of the resources most of the time.
- When I backed up my last computer (Windows 7) prior to upgrading to Windows 10, I had a free copy of Acronis TrueImage just for that purpose, and so far it has seemed to work beautifully. I have zero problems recovering files from that backup.
- Currently I'm using Paragon Hard Disk Manager, which is fast and simple. So far it seems ok, but I haven't had to restore from it yet.
So with that experience, I'd probably look at Acronis and Paragon. My concern always though, is - when I need to recover these files, how do I do so if my computer doesn't have the software that created the backup? (Assume new computer or freshly reinstalled system.)
That's tricky and a spot where the things like Unison and DriveImageXML may still hold some value. If you can make a backup of your backup software separate from your backup so you can be sure to have it available to restore, then that might not be a concern. But it's always been a concern of mine - having a full backup of my data but in a format that I can't access.
I think there's one that can make a virtual hard disk as a backup that mirrors the real one, so without anything but the OS, you could boot and mount your backup as if it were the system disk, but I don't remember what it is.
I think that even though some pop-up messages tell you that the previous backup will be blown away, it actually is incremental to a certain extent, and the recovery tool in the installer sometimes does list multiple dates to restore from -- although I'm not sure if and how data retention can be controlled. Also disk encryption is removed on restore, and I think the backup is not encrypted at rest either; you need to keep it in an encrypted location to begin with.
For file-level backups, I'm using an rsync frontend, QtdSync, but I also had success with Borg running under Msys2's Python interpreter.
Using a network location is somewhat less useful. You lose Volume Shadow Copy so it becomes a single generation full-backup-every-time solution. It's still easy to mount and to restore from, but marginally more useless.
It would figure that Microsoft announced (last year, I believe) that the feature is no longer being developed.
Other than that, it did seem like it fit my needs. :(