I’ve been studying the computer backup industry for 3 years now and I’ve been selling my own online backup product, Arq, since February 2010. I’ve seen and heard lots of different approaches to backing up one’s computer. Here are some backup lessons I’ve learned. 1. Assume your hard drive will fail very soon Expect imminent [...]
7 facets of a good Mac backup strategy
January 23rd, 2012Arq 2.4 is out!
December 29th, 2011Arq version 2.4 is now available! This update includes support for the new “sa-east-1″ (São Paulo, Brazil) S3 region. It also now checks whether Amazon S3 is experiencing long “eventual consistency” delays, abort backup and budget enforcement activities until the next backup interval to avoid potential data loss due to incorrect (old) values being returned from [...]
iCloud and SyncPhotos
December 7th, 2011Apple’s new iCloud service is a new offering for all Macs running OS X Lion 10.7.2 and all iOS devices running iOS 5. iCloud includes Photo Stream (if you have iPhoto 9.2, otherwise known as iPhoto ’11, on your Mac). Photo Stream syncs your photos across all your Apple devices (iPhones, iPods, iPads, Macs). It keeps the [...]
Arq 2.3 is out!
December 7th, 2011Arq version 2.3 is now available! This update includes support for the new “us-west-2″ (Oregon) S3 region. It’s a free update for all Arq users. As always, full release notes for all Arq versions are on the release notes page.
Arq, SyncPhotos, Duplifinder are Lion compatible apps
July 20th, 2011OS X Lion is out, and all Haystack Software apps are compatible. Arq 1.7.7: online backup to Amazon S3 SyncPhotos 2.0.7: sync your iPhoto Libraries across computers Duplifinder 2.0.3: eliminate duplicate photos If you do happen to run into an issue with any of the above, please email support@haystacksoftware.com and I’ll address the issue very [...]
Online Backup and Redundancy
June 21st, 2011Do you use an online backup product/service? Ever wonder where your data are actually being stored? Ever wonder how safe and reliable that storage is? It comes down to 1 question: How much redundancy do you have? Let’s look at the types of redundancy. But first a word about tape: Disk vs. Tape [...]
Arq 1.7 is out!
December 26th, 2010This release is mostly focused on budgeting. There’s a new view that shows current S3 space usage, and a new menu item to trigger Arq Agent to enforce the budget. Get the new version by selecting “Check for Updates” from the Arq menu, or download it from http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/ Here are the details: Release Notes for Arq [...]
A little less data loss in the world
December 13th, 2010I’m passionate building a software business as an indie Mac developer, but I’m equally passionate about helping people protect themselves from data loss. Back in February 2010 I ran several online backup applications through a test suite called Backup Bouncer, hoping it would increase awareness among users and attract enough attention to get the providers [...]
iPhotoSync 1.3 is out!
December 3rd, 2010This update adds documentation and fixes several bugs including other computers not showing up on launch. To get it, pick “Check for Updates” from the iPhotoSync menu, or download it from the iPhotoSync page. Release Notes for iPhotoSync Version 1.3 Feature Additions Added ‘How It Works’ section to Help documentation. Ask for permission before launching iPhotoSync [...]
Arq 1.6 is out!
November 26th, 2010This update includes performance improvements and bug fixes. To get it, pick “Check for Updates” from the Arq menu, or download it from the product page. Here are the details: Release Notes for Arq Backup Version 1.6 Feature Additions Several performance improvements, including: Much faster collection of referenced objects for a backup version (used in verify-backups [...]