Lots of people have emailed me asking for a way to put their stuff on Glacier and then delete it from their hard drives, because they’re running out of disk space. I used to think that disk space was becoming so plentiful that this would never be a problem, but the disk-space growth graph started over with the advent of SSDs, so I guess we’re not there yet!
Arq is our backup app that reliably backs up your files to your own Amazon Glacier account. It has always expected the files to remain on your disk. But now we’ve changed that! You can pick a folder and mark it as an archive.
Add a folder to Arq, and choose “Glacier storage class” when prompted. (This is assuming you’re using AWS as your backup destination). When it’s been backed up, select it and click the “Detach” button:
The icon for the folder will change to a box, and the backups of that folder will stay in your AWS account, but Arq won’t try to back it up anymore. Now you can delete your files from your disk, but restore them from Glacier if you ever need them!
To “re-attach” the folder so that Arq starts backing up again, select it and click the “Attach” button (where the “Detach” button used to be):
By the way, you can do this no matter what destination type you’re using, whether it’s Amazon Glacier, S3, Dropbox, Google Drive or SFTP.
As always, if you have any questions please email support@haystacksoftware.com and we’ll help you out.
- Stefan