best-of Backup Software: Arq for Mac OS X

Cloud backup is more than a little scary; there are a lot of unknowns regarding who has access to your data, how reliable the restoration and backup procedures are, and possibly being locked in to data archive formats that nobody else understands.

Arq provides de-duplicated, encrypted-to-you-only backup and archiving using Amazon’s S3 and Glacier storage services. I did an interview with the author of Arq on episode 2x02 of the hellyeah! show and we discussed common problems in cloud backup services, and how Arq restores control over your data to you.

There is even an open-sourced command-line utility called arq_restore that can be used to restore your data even if there is no more Arq!

• Versioned backups
• De-duplicated for efficiency
• reliable Amazon storage services
• low-cost (0.01-per-GB on Glacier)

I love what Stefan Reitshamer has done for Mac users with this software and can’t recommend it enough.