I understand the appeal of the file tree view, but it doesn’t handle excludes very well. Jungle Disk has a (rather techie) feature of adding wildcard excludes, but they’re not represented in the file tree. If you add some excludes, looking at the file tree doesn’t really show you that a bunch of files/folders are being excluded from the backup.

Your way is ‘rather techie’ IMHO. You have to use manually created filters and you have no idea which data is actually excluded from the backup, you simply have to trust your skills to create filters yourself. In Jungle Disk, the tree view indicates where files/folders are excluded or not with respective symbols and colors. And is is not necessary to remember the files/folders you want to exclude in order to create a filter, you just click on files and folders and you get immediate feedback. That is BTW pretty standard in backup software, it is not an exotic wish.

Could you please tell me more about what problem you’re trying to solve here? Is it just that you want to be able to tell exactly what on your computer will be backed up given the configured folders and exclude rules? Or something else?

The former, and that should not really be a question. I want of course know whether files and folders get saved or not. The same goes for information on the size of my backup and a log file with information on data transferred, etc.

Arq is promising but it is not a serious contender with the current GUI if you want to backup selected files and folders and not just everything. Is it also very inconvenient that you have to remove folders from the backup if you want to add its root folder.

Could you please tell me more about what problem you’re trying to solve here? Is it just that you want to be able to tell exactly what on your computer will be backed up given the configured folders and exclude rules? Or something else?

It doesn’t help that files are now listed as folders. A folder tree as used in Jungle Disk would still be my preference, it is very easy to see at first sight which folders are selected and which not and you can select whole folder structures as well as single files. In addition, it becomes immediately clear which folders and files are excluded from the backup.

- Stefan

Thank you very much for the possibility to add single files

I’m able to drag and drop single files to backup, but not to pick up them when I click the “Add a folder for backup” button. Well the name of the button is clear… but it seems to me it would be more consistent if I could add files or folders to backup with both methods.

Arq does actually need a password to restore your files. It uses the encryption password you chose at setup time. That password is stored securely in your keychain.

If you leave your computer logged in and unattended, then someone could use Arq to restore your files because it’s logged in as you and can therefore read the password from the keychain. You could set your “Arq Encryption” keychain entry so that OS X asks you when Arq Agent wants to use it, but you’d be clicking “Allow” all day long.

Other systems like GPG/PGP have a passphrase feature as well (like the keychain does) but you have to type it in each time.

I think to do what you’re proposing would mean to use a public/private key pair. Arq Agent would encrypt the backups using the private key, and you’d have to enter the public key to decrypt the backups. My gut reaction is that this is more hassle than most people want, but I’m very open to making whatever it is that people want. Would anyone else like to give their opinion on this one?

As far as the password for restores, here’s a scenario: You have very sensitive business data on your work computer. You delete it from your computer, because it’s so very sensitive, but keep the Arq backup on the S3 servers. You leave Arq agent running, to continue to backup your computer. Someone else at work gets on your computer and because Arq has no password to restore files, this unauthorized users can access your sensitive data. But having the option to password protect your data, even on your own computer, would make the backed-up data secure in this situation. I could give you more scenarios with spouses or the government gaining access to your computer, and thus access to backed-up files which you wish to remain completely secure. Perhaps the vast majority of people do not need level of security, but for those who do, it seems like it would be an easy function to add, and it would make Arq that much more attractive for the data-paranoid.