You can no longer control the software updater, which now updates to the latest version without even telling you. You can no longer quit the agent process-I now regularly force-quit it, as it swells to 25 GB of RAM. You can no longer start and stop backups from the menu bar. You can no longer see a preview of which items will be backed up. The log and status e-mails no longer tell you what was backed up. You have to enter the backup password every time you change a setting. It no longer shows the amount of cloud storage used. Other useful features from Arq 5 are absent. Even then, it’s cumbersome enough that I need to invert my backup selection model: instead of including a few big folders with lots of exclusions, it now makes more sense to selectively include smaller folders. It’s short and narrow, with no indented wrapping, so I pretty much need to copy the text to BBEdit to see what’s going on. With Arq 6, this is all replaced by a text box filled with a mix of paths and globs. And there was a rule-criterion-like interface for excluding items based on patterns in their names. For example, when selecting which files to exclude, there used to be an outline view showing a live view of the file system, with checkboxes to mark items for exclusion. There are also areas where the new interface is designed in a less useful way. (The background agent process that does the work remains Objective-C.) The problems with Electron range from the superficial (everything just looks and feels off) to the functional (you can’t navigate outline views with the arrow keys or type-selection). The bad news is that the app you interact with is now built with Electron. You can view the log for a backup right in the activity display, without having to go to a separate app. It is easier to find things and to see what the app is currently doing. The good news is that the new design makes much more logical sense. The user interface has been completely redone. Lots of operations are apparently faster or more efficient, although I haven’t had a chance to experience this yet. You can restore without having to first download large amounts of metadata, which was previously necessary when restoring from another Mac’s backup or if Arq’s cache had been deleted or lost. It can warn you if there hasn’t been a backup in a while. The retention rules are now customizable (and per-backup). The rate limiting is more flexible and can be set per-backup. It supports Amazon’s Glacier Deep Archive (1/4 the price of Glacier, but with a 12-hour restore delay) and Google Cloud Storage’s Archive (no delay, but can’t delete for a year). This had been annoying me daily for about 10 years. You can finally give backups and storage locations names. Multiple backups can now run in parallel, so you can keep making regular backups to important small files while uploading your photo archive over a period of weeks. This is great because it means Arq’s backup will be a perfectly consistent view of your files at a point in time, even if you’re modifying files as Arq is backing them up.īacking up from a snapshot is great, and it’s one of several important enhancements to Arq’s backup engine: We worked with Apple to get access to the APFS API, so Arq 6 has native support for creating and using APFS snapshots. Lifetime licenses are no longer for sale, but they’re honored if you had already purchased one. Our goal with Arq 6 was to make it work with the latest operating system features and the latest cloud storage options, make it more secure, and add the features people have been asking for, all while keeping it very simple to use, with smart default settings. It’s been 4 years since Arq 5 first came out (although we’ve shipped 155 updates to Arq 5 in the meantime).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |