How many ways can a Mac user backup folders and files? Backup apps and utilities may seem like an endless list if you start counting.
Let’s see, off the top of my head, there’s Time Machine, SuperDuper!, Carbon Copy Cloner, ChronoSync come to mind right away, and coupled with a few external disk drives for added storage, each one can play a part in a comprehensive file backup plan.
Most backup plans have a hole. A big hole. The catastrophic disaster hole. If your critical files are backed up at home or the office then what happens when your Mac is stolen, or a tornado, earthquake, flood, or fire destroys the building where your Mac is? To avoid the catastrophe of losing everything in a disaster, you need an off-site backup plan; one to store massive amounts of files, but quickly, silently, and inexpensively.
That’s Arq, one of those elegant Mac tools that rounds out my backup plan; an app that does what Time Machine, SuperDuper!, CCC, and others do not– backup massive numbers of files and folders offsite, online, and away from your Mac and catastrophic danger.
Select the files and folders you want to backup online, select the service you want to use (more on that in a moment), and let Arq begin the backup in the background.
Arq setup is intuitive and simple, but gives you options to include and exclude specific files and folders from the background backup process.
Alright, where does Arq backup files?
That’s the beauty of Arq.
Cloud storage has become all the rage these days what with iCloud and a dozen competitors making it somewhat easy to back up a few files, but not large numbers of files– as in many, many gigabytes of data. The latest version of Arq handles backups to Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon Web Services (S3), Amazon Glacier (cheap but slow), Amazon Cloud Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, even standard FTP servers. Also on the list are Amazon’s Glacier service and Google’s Nearline storage. That means lots of storage, very low price– an excellent way to archive gigabytes of files.
Another beauty included in Arq is that it’s Mac-centric. Files are encrypted for security, and there’s no limit on file size. Plus, all the standard Mac file attributes and metadata are maintained. It’s like backing up files to another giant Mac in the cloud. It even keeps multiple versions of you files (somewhat like Time Machine, but Arq can back that up, too).
If your Mac’s files are important to you and you must have an online, cloud-based backup, Arq is a good place to start. All you’ll need is your Mac, files to backup, Arq, and one of the many supported online backup services.
This app is highly recommended as the online component to file backups.