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Comment by chrislund | Hacker News Reader

FYI: I've used Arq for nearly a decade and have loved it, but the latest version, 6—which was something like a complete refactor IIRC—seems to be riddled with bugs (including, I think, data loss) and the support experience has not been good (both being deviations from normal). I'm not up-to-date on the whole saga but it's been disheartening to watch. I'm sticking with 5 for now. I just Googled around and it looks like a v7 is in beta testing and reports are that it's better than 6...

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Could you elaborate on the data loss bugs. I recently had to restore from an Arq 6 based backup and ran into some issues where it seemed like if the screen saver started during the restore it would just stop restoring but would not give any error. I was able to get all my data back by disabling the screen saver, but seemed very strange.

Not trying to peddle hearsay, but with just some cursory Googling I can't pull up any citations. IIRC there were several complaints of data loss in the ArqBackup subreddit [0], I think mostly around botched Arq 5 imports (Arq 6 uses a new format and perhaps data was lost in conversions gone awry).

Michael Tsai has a good summary of the situation that he wrote when Arq 6 was just out, and echos my recollection of issues with data loss [1].

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Arqbackup/

[1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/04/13/arq-6/

I'm holding steady on v5 to Backblaze as the v6 migration path was promised post-v6 release, in June, and still hasn't appeared. And it also appears that support responsiveness has gotten worse.

I run backups on three Macs every 48 hours, then once a month or so I will use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the two more important ones to sparse image files on a backup hard drive which is physically secured afterwards.

In the course of building that data compatibility, our plans changed, we think for the better. We wrote about it here: https://www.arqbackup.com/blog/next-up-arq-7/

I'm sorry you feel support isn't responsive. We aim to answer emails within 1 business day, as we always have. We've added staff to do this.

Thanks for the update and for responding here. Hadn't heard about the v7 plans, so good luck — sounds like a good move.

I don't have any particular support complaints myself; my comment was based more on perception based on Twitter & other discussions I'd seen.

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