Today, the folks at Code42 reminded me that I was due to renew my CrashPlan service. I am certain that I told them in January that they would see no more of my money. Apparently they didn’t take my declaration seriously, but after that fiasco I was determined to find a better solution. In June I began backing up my data to Amazon’s S3 Glacier service using the fantastically stable and fast Arq from Haystack Software. Arq is a backup/restore client that manages the whole process of online/remote backups and it works wonderfully. I am using it to provide full backups of my machines to Amazon’s S3 Glacier. This means that backups are fast - no! faster than fast! I was able to move more than 2T into S3 in a matter of a weekend - something that took over a month when I started using CrashPlan last year. Since my S3 backups are the backup to my backup I am willing to pay money if I ever have to retrieve them. If my house burns down and takes all my computers and data and backups with it, I will be happy to pay whatever I need to pay to get my data out of S3. It is not my only backup though… I am using Arq to backup to a machine in my basement that is acting as an SFTP server and I keep most of my active data in Dropbox and they have file versioning and recovery. I know… Dropbox is not backup - but I can get my files back from there if I need to.

In short, I am now paying less money to use Amazon as an offsite backup, with the prospect that I will have to pay through the nose if I ever do have to recover files, but I feel much more secure. Arq is amazingly simple and stable. I am happy - for now.