Comments on: How to back up your Mac using Arq

By: Stefan Reitshamer

Stefan Reitshamer — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 20:08:59 +0000

Sorry, regular expressions aren’t supported currently.
You could exclude where name contains ‘.mp’

By: John

John — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 01:54:06 +0000

Is it possible to exclude files and folders by regular expression. So for example if I want to exclude all mp3 and mp4 files can I exclude *.mp*

By: Stefan Reitshamer

Stefan Reitshamer — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 20:13:43 +0000

Yes, eventually. Not sure when though.

By: Christopher York

Christopher York — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 18:31:37 +0000

Arq looks great! Is there any chance you will include a feature to create multiple backup jobs that can be scheduled to run separately?

By: Stefan Reitshamer

Stefan Reitshamer — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:18:36 +0000

A future version of Arq will have a more flexible folder chooser, but not in the short term, sorry.

Whether you want to back up several folders individually or 1 folder with exclusions is mostly up to you. I use the several-folders approach myself.

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:10:08 +0000

Thanks for the detailed responses… I just ran across the issue where I tried to add an enclosing folder to be backed up, but got the error message Martin mentioned (and I don’t believe I’ve quite Arq since I started using it). Message says:
“Failed to add folder for backup
/Volumes/DriveName/Users/UserName/Documents/Clients contain the folder “ClientOneName” which is already being backed up”
(general names inserted)

So now I’m at the fork in the road where I have to decide, will I keep adding folders one-by-one? Or should I trash the current backup, and start again with the entire home folder (with exclusions)? I assume I can remove exclusions at any time? Is there any chance this limitation (not being able to add enclosing folders) will be worked around in future version of Arq? Any advice on how to continue?

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:57:18 +0000

@Stefan:

1) Yes, you can definitely add folders one by one, and then remove them all and add the home folder (which contains all the other folders). As long as you do this without quitting Arq in between, Arq won’t delete and then re-upload the data.

The current version of Arq shows an error message if you try to backup a folder with one or more sub-folders already included in the backup. Couldn’t Arq just handle this issue automatically without an error message and the need for manual deletion?

Manual deletion is not user-friendly, in particular since Arq lacks a tree view showing all the folders already included in the backup.

(That is an area where I hope for major improvements anyway. I like to see which directories and files get saved and which not.)

@Rob:

2) I use 1Password, not my standard Mac keychain, but I see all my Arq data is stored on my Mac keychain. Is there any way or plan to use something other than the Mac keychain?

1Password cannot fully replace the Mac OS X keychain. You can of course add your Amazon S3 credentials to your 1Password keychain, however, it is still not the keychain where Mac OS X applications get their passwords, etc. from.

3) If I choose to use my new S3 account to deliver web content (using CloudFront), are there any issues I should be aware of, or potential conflicts using Arq with the same account?

I use my S3 account for various purposes including Arq. There should be no issues as long as you use different buckets.

By: Stefan Reitshamer

Stefan Reitshamer — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 03:59:09 +0000

Rob,
If you restart your computer while Arq is doing the initial backup, when Arq restarts it will start the backup from the beginning, but it won’t upload files that it has already uploaded. So for example, if you get 50% of the way through your initial backup and then restart, Arq will start from the beginning but you’ll see the progress bar move extremely quickly for the first 50% of the backup because it has already uploaded those files to S3.

Once there is an initial backup, Arq uses that as a baseline (comparing file sizes and last-modified times of the files to the data in the backup), so subsequent backups go much much faster.

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 02:50:39 +0000

Double-shoot, I figured it out right after I hit the “submit” button. I see each folder has it’s own progress when you select it… I do love how fast it is compared to Carbonite, my only other online backup trial.

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 02:48:23 +0000

Shoot, sorry to clog your post with support questions… As I’m backing up another few folders, I can’t seem to find my way to the screen that shows my progress (I saw it the first time). At the bottom of the screen I currently see “Backing up FolderName Data” but no other sense of progress.