I’ve used Arq and Backblaze in the past. I dropped Backblaze a while ago.
Arq had issues with version 6. Version 5 and 7 never caused issues for me. Restores work as expected.
Backblaze spends a lot on marketing, but their software quality seems to have an amateurish touch (bugs, longstanding security issues, questionable design decisions and other things giving them a really bad look) that several people/engineers highlighted while I was looking on Twitter and Hackernews a while back (examples linked in the comment below):
In addition to those issues, they don’t really back up all your data:
Here is a comment quoting Backblaze themselves on this:
Encrypted DT databases can’t be backed up unless open.
Some other issues I encountered while using Backblaze:
- No zero knowledge encryption because restores aren’t possible without giving them your password.
- Web restores have to be divided in dozens of parts because of some limitation.
- You have to request the restores, which can take days if your backup size is bigger than a few hundred GB.
- No real search feature for all your backups. You have to reload the restore website, navigate to a date, look for your data and then reload the whole page if you need to navigate to another date.
- Their downloader app crashes a lot while restoring files.
- I often had to force quit their backup agent process because Backblaze didn’t see changes.
- Their backup is said to run constantly, but in reality it was mostly every 4-6 hours.
In comparison, Arq has better features:
- Immutable backups.
- You can schedule as needed.
- Snapshot based backups.
- Zero knowledge encryption.
- Restores without any delay.
- Restores to a chosen folder or the original location.
- Search that finds all versions of your files easily, no navigation in a calendar view necessary.
- Multiple destinations, remote and local backups.
- Smaller CPU footprint and more responsive software.
- No limitations with external drives.
- NAS support.
- …