A question concerning MANUAL & INEXPENSIVE DTP3 backups

[BLUEFROG]

Very diplomatic @chrillek

/bites tongue
/curses under breath

[BLUEFROG]

Bookmarked and copied to a Markdown doc in DEVONthink. Great stuff!

[DCBerk]

Backups: sigh. Why are the things we Have To Do so boring (rhetorical ??). So I use Time Machine to back up occasionally to a big old hard drive. And I have critical things I’m currently working on sitting in iCloud. And I have Backblaze. So I’ve made it as easy as possible and it seems to be working fine – and when four drops of clean water on the keyboard fried my MacBookPro logic board, I was very, very grateful to have them. My question for the group: Arq? As is my wont, I looked up most recent reviews and Arq doesn’t do very well. And nobody here mentioned Backblaze (which I learned about here), which gets very good reviews. Something I’ve missed?

[DTLow]

@DCBerk

I looked up most recent reviews and Arq doesn’t do very well.

Can you post a link to those reviews
I needed a cloud version of Time Machine, and committed to a year with Arq Premium
So far (2 weeks), the results look good

[chrillek]

I think Arq had some problems when version 7 came out. I’m using it regularly (also to backup to Blaze), and have no complaints.

But (big but!): I didn’t have to restore anything yet. Not drinking while working…

[Airestocky]

what does it cost to loose a week of work?

[chrk]

@DCBerk

My question for the group: Arq? As is my wont, I looked up most recent reviews and Arq doesn’t do very well. And nobody here mentioned Backblaze (which I learned about here), which gets very good reviews. Something I’ve missed?

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):

Confused on the correct way to backup all my devonthink data, advice appreciate

I used both Backblaze Personal and Arq in the past, but stopped using Backblaze recently. They were always very political in what they didn’t back up (Finder tags…), but given their low pricing I kept using the product in addition to Arq (I would never have been comfortable with Backblaze as my main remote backup). Due to missteps stacking up over the last 12 months or so, I canceled my subscription. The main issues bothering me are related to security & software quality and their politcal sta…

In addition to those issues, they don’t really back up all your data:

Backblaze backup of metadata...are forum warnings still valid?

I second @Blanc 's assumption. When I was still using Backblaze, restores lost metadata like Finder tags, but that applied to single files, like PDFs. The image or even a regular Devonthink database backup should work without losing metadata of the files contained in that package. However, I would certainly test it again in your case. If you search the Backblaze subreddit, they are quite opinionated about not supporting metadata like Finder tags, because, according to them, they serve no go…

Here is a comment quoting Backblaze themselves on this:

Backblaze backup of metadata...are forum warnings still valid?

FWIW, here’s the response from Backblaze support: “Extended attributes aren’t included in the backed up files. This means no finder comments, no finder tags, no quarantine information, and a few other items. Permissions and modified dates are retained. Creation dates are technically backed up as well but they aren’t retained when restoring a file so they’re essentially not backed up as well. You might also find modified dates to be changed to the date that files are restored via zip restore a…

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.
• …

[Stephen_C]

@DTLow

I needed a cloud version of Time Machine, and committed to a year with Arq Premium
So far (2 weeks), the results look good

I’m a week behind you with Arq Premium but agree with your assessment (just in case it assists others here).

Stephen

[chrk]

@Axel

I don’t know exactly what volume of data will be loaded onto Wasabi if I change one file per day in each of the 7 databases. Will an additional 125 GB be created immutable for the duration of the lock? So with a daily backup and a lock duration of 30 days, a data volume of 30 x 125 GB?

No, Arq deduplicates data and will only upload the changes.

Just be aware that Wasabi has a 90 day minimum storage time requirement. So you might make your backups immutable for 90 days (instead of 30) because you are paying for it anyway, even if you delete something earlier.

[tja]

I just read that and wanted to summarize some points, @winmker

Your proposed idea works perfectly fine!

But it is a bit lacking … so let’s add some generic information:

A good advice is, to have 2 local and 1 remote “current” copies of your data.

Of course, TimeMachine can be used for the second local copy.
Wether that should be done automatically or manually depends on your needs and type of data, also the rate of change to your data.

In general, new backups are only required when something important got added or changed. That’s your decision.

And then, you should also have at least one older backup, an archive - in case things go bad.

If your remote solution is OneDrive or Dropbox, this also protects against ransomware or similar problems, because they can also act as archive - restoring older versions of you data from their versioning.

I am not sure about iCloud in this regard, but read that this is not fully possible - only for “documents”.

So, in such a case, you should archive data yourself, meaning that you hold and rotate older backups.

Again, such archives could just be additional and older local backups, but if the amount of data allows for this, it is good to (also) have them in a remote location.

That’s it.

And in case of DEVONthink, you often already added a remote sync location, which solves the “remote current copy” automatically.
So, with your manual backup, you are already quite secure.

The only thing missing is, that you should hold some older archives and rotate them from time to time. At best local and on a remote location.