Object Storage for Small & Medium Enterprises - PART-2: Arq Backup

As second tool I would like to write a small overview on the Arq backup and recovery tool which is available for Mac and Windows. Many smaller clients seek a lightweight but reliable backup solution and this is right where Arq comes into play.

It is not the most feature-rich product but it has great performance in combination with Object Storage and his key functionality is simplicity and automation. In the first releases it was only available for Mac which also steered them into this direction.

Let's start by downloading and installing the Arc Backup software which can be found at arqbackup.com and simply installed by following the installation wizard. After the installation the following screen will appear due to an automatic start of Arc :

Since it is the first time we will need to create/connect a storage target, on their website our IBM Cloud Object Storage offering is not yet included although we beat all the listed prices with higher reliability design, I will of-course use our beloved public COS environment for my demonstration. Select Preferences to add a cloud target :

We are not listed seperatly in the backup destination list but we are S3 compliant so you can select the "Other S3-Compatible Service" from the drop-down. Include your connection details (can be obtained at bluemix.com) where we have a 25GB free tier for our object storage solution :

In the next window I receive an overview of all my buckets within this storage account, since Arq prefers to have a dedicated bucket I let him create a new one for this demo :

Nothing else required as initial configuration, cloud target has been defined.

Let's now quickly check the other tabs in the preferences pane, in the network tab you are able to perform some QOS on the networking connections so you make sure your backup is not saturating your network connection :

In the e-mail tab it is possible to received alerts when a backup fails/completes, always use-full to do a proper follow-up or let someone else know the status of your backups:

As last there are some Advanced settings, not really required to perform any changes here since they are trying to make sure a daily backup can be completed.

So now we have fully configured the Arq application, next is to add a backup folder. Simply select "Add a Folder to Backups..." to do this :

Select one of your important folders to be included in your backup schedule :

After selecting a folder an encryption password is requested, this guarantees that without the application it is impossible to access your data in the bucket :

Gentle reminder.... and yes everybody had this issue before but please do not write it down and leave it on your desk :-)

A friendly wizard is activated to explain what is going to happen now, your folder is included into the backup schedule :

The agent is now also running in the background :

By default the schedule is set hourly, this can be changed if you would like to set a different backup schedule. I Now manually start a backup at 9.22am :

Backup has been started, you can use the "View Upload Items" to review the status.

Of course there is also a log that keep track on the performed backups :

When reviewing the backups on the public cloud bucket we can see all the different items but for security reasons they cannot be recovered directly due to the encryption :

Now the most important part... what about a restore? Simply browse your cloud target and select the files/folder your would like to restore :

Now you have two options, restore and overwrite or restore it to a different location :

I selected to not overwrite so it has been restored to a separate folder :

Simply click "Show Restored Item" to automatically open the folder :

As explained, not a huge amount of features within the S3 backup tool but it works so great and fast that it is a please to use. In terms of pricing there is only a 49,99 on-time fee which provide all features as pre-internet encryption and de-duplication.

Since I have a hourly schedule at 10 am an incremental backup happened, nothing changed within this folder so only some metadata was updated :

So this concludes this overview of Arq Backup software, if you like a simple but reliable backup tool to S3 it surely should be one of the tools to test!