What are /r/ArqBackup_Community's favorite Products & Services?

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Locked into Arq. Most backup apps are like this though. Duplicacy is similar to Arq but they have a restore application (command line) that is open source and free to download via Github.

What you see on S3 end are mostly encrypted chunks of file. The process of Arq (or most other backup softwares) is, it divides a single file into small pieces(called chunk), encrypted chunks separetely and then upload them. This design is essential for three functions: encryption, increasment uploading, deduplication. Allow me to explain this a little bit.

1. For encryption, a file-by-file encryption is possible, but it will leak file size and directory structure. Moreover, since most encryption methods have a safe upper limit of size for a single key(for example, 64GiB for aes-gcm), any correctly implement encryption will chunk file for security and reliable reason(that a small damage won't propagate to the entire file). If you see some software encrypts file-by-file, it's just chunks belongs to a single file putting together, nothing essentially different.
2. Since most cloud storages, like S3, don't support uploading part of a file, you need to upload a 100g file again even if you just made a 1kb change on it. Chunks avoid this, you only need to upload chunks changed in this case.
3. As point 2, deduplication will happen only on file base if there's no chunk.

If you don't need encryption at all and your files are relatively small, an as-it-is backup may be a good ideal. Traditionally rsync is designed for this purpose, however it only supports sftp backend. For storages like s3, you can try rclone.

MacOS user here. I just moved off Arq completely and over to Duplicacy. I've been running Duplicacy since ~2 days into the v6 release as a "just in case," but that turned into Duplicacy being my only backup app this week.

It's fast - really fast, GUI is nice, CLI is very powerful, and it's using slightly less RAM than Arq, although Arq's usage was inline with any other app.

How I back up: MacBook Pro -> Synology. Synology -> CloudSync with GDrive AND Synology -> HyperBackup to B2 (using new S3 API). Duplicacy is managing just over 2TB of data for me.

A few things:

1. Duplicacy does have just 1 developer but that dev is very active on the community and has curated a lot of support from prosumer members.
2. Duplicacy is missing a big feature for me in that, I want an email alert ONLY when a job fails. Right now, it emails every time the job runs. You can have it post to an HTML page (read: healthchecks.io) upon failure but that creates additional work / another app to maintain.
3. The true power of Duplicacy comes from its CLI. People are doing crazy-awesome stuff with it but if you just want a replacement for Arq, the GUI will do everything you need.

Overall, I'm happy with it. One day I might return to Arq but for now, I'm happy with Duplicacy. The community over there is a huge help and it's comforting to know the dev. is super active with everyone.

New build (6.2.16) was just released - https://www.arqbackup.com/download/arqbackup/arq6_release_notes.html

(I went back to Arq 5 after losing prior backups by "upgrading" to 6.)

I also had no idea this was a new release. As a new user it works great for me.

I’m using Wasabi and had no problems setting it up or testing it. But until there’s documentation, and until the arq_restore command-line utility is updated to work with V6, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re prepared to do your own research (as you did). The developer screwed up bigtime but the product is solid IMO. I wouldn’t blame anyone for dumping this product, but I haven’t found anything better.

If you ask for suggestions you’ll get referred to Duplicacy, by the way. People seem to love it. Definitely check it out. I thought it sucked. To each their own.