Arq Restore Notes
The other backup tool that has saved my hide in the past is SuperDuper!, but on this occasion I didn’t have access to my physical (SuperDuper!) backup, so restoring from the cloud (Arq) was my only option.
[…]
Arq used all the memory on the system, requiring me to start again[…] Restarting is a bit annoying, because I use Glacier storage for my backups, meaning that you can’t just start downloading the data from the cloud; instead, you request for it to be made available and then wait 5 hours before actually beginning the download. Downloading from Glacier also hurts the wallet a bit, to the tune of about a hundred bucks for all the retrieval costs associated with the repeated attempts.
[…]
There are a number of apps that you have to open or twiddle in order to get things working, even though Homebrew installs them[…]
Backup and restore have definitely gotten easier over the years, but whether on iOS or macOS restoring is never as smooth as you’d hope.
Previously:
- Parachute Backup Acquired
- SuperDuper 3.12
- Backblaze No Longer Backs Up Dropbox
- Carbon Copy Cloner 7.1.3
- A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Permissions Requests
- Arq 7
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Arq continues to periodically fill up my computers' disks with its cache files, and my attempts to report this as an issue have been effectively ignored. I just don't think it's reasonable to use over 10% of the size of the data you're backing up for caches. Last week I only noticed the disk filled up on my usually-headless Mac mini because SpamSieve stopped filtering. Arq even required coaxing to stop the backups (had to pause and resume) so I could delete its caches.
Hoping someday there'll be an alternative backup app with a decent Mac interface and Arq's flexibility of backup destinations.
@Nicholas I like Arq, but, yeah, the caches are huge. Mine are less than 10% but still 42 GB at the moment.
I wonder if Migration Assistant is the best, first party, way to create and restore a clone. I gave up on Disk Utility many year ago.
Arq's cache also hovers around 10% of my storage as well.
What puzzles me is that even with this huge database of every file in every backup record, the UI remains slow — listing the backup records of my current machine takes several seconds, for example.
Yes, Arq keeps a lot of cached indexes around, and it's not easy to see an alternative since small requests take time and cost by the request if not by the byte. Arq is a great fit for backing up highly specific things, but not just the whole of your home excluding caches, IMO. Keep your backups small, reduce the retention period as much as possible, maybe clear the local cache from time to time so that you can check the backed up data against the records that are present in your backup set (and remove unreferenced objects to free space that's not in a record). But realistically the metadata has to be local in order to back up fast and quickly find and restore data.
