Today we’re releasing Arq 6! We’re really excited about this. It’s been 4 years since Arq 5 first came out (although we’ve shipped 155 updates to Arq 5 in the meantime).

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. We used our 10+ years of backup experience to try to make it the best backup app out there.

Perfect Backups

We worked with Apple to get access to the APFS API, so Arq 6 has native support for creating and using APFS snapshots.

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.

This is super useful for backing up things like virtual machines that are in use, for example.

On Windows, Arq 6 now uses VSS for the entire volume in order to achieve perfect backups.

More Power

Arq 6 is more powerful in a bunch of ways:

Arq 6 can run multiple backup jobs in parallel

Arq 6 scans and uploads files in parallel for faster throughput

it auto-mounts network shares on Mac for reliable backup of NAS data

you can limit the scheduled backups to certain days of the week

you can limit the transfer rate to certain times of the day and certain days of the week

Arq 6 has powerful new rules for selecting which files are included and excluded from backup

Arq 6 has time-based retention rules in addition to budget-based rules

you can optionally keep deleted files in subsequent backups for easy locating of deleted files

you can configure it to alert if there have been no backups for a certain number of days (instead of after every aborted backup)

Arq 6’s new data format eliminates the need for reading metadata before browsing and restoring from other computers’ backups

More secure

Arq 6 has a new password feature. You can set a password to prevent others from opening Arq and deleting backups.

It also switches to using SHA256 for checksums instead of SHA1 which is less secure.

More storage savings

Arq 6 takes advantage of the latest ultra-cheap storage available from AWS and Google.

AWS’s Glacier Deep Archive storage option is only $0.99/TB per month!

Google’s new Archive option is similarly inexpensive at $1.23/TB per month, and with no delay in downloading your data.

New Arq Premium subscription option

Our new subscription offering is called Arq Premium. It’s $5.99/month for all the features of Arq 6 for up to 5 computers, plus:

1 TB of storage included

Super-simple setup

Secure web access to your backups if you need to grab files

Arq Premium is a great option for folks who want a simple, all-in-one backup solution.

Get It!

Arq 6 is a paid upgrade for Arq 5 users. Download it here or buy now.

If you purchased a “lifetime” license code in the past, use that in Arq 6. If you don’t have the license code handy, log into cloud.arqbackup.com and retrieve it.

As always, if you have any questions please email us at support@arqbackup.com.

Even More Features

But wait, there’s more!

All-new, modern user interface (with the same great native Mac and Windows agents)

Disk device tracking instead of path-based; multiple external drives with the same name are treated as separate volumes

Faster object cleanup

Faster validation

Faster search

System-level daemon on Mac so it can back up when you’re not logged in

Destination-agnostic, portable data format that’s open and documented

Progress bars showing percent complete

Wake-for-backup option

More informative SMTP test results — full SMTP connection log when an error occurs

Proper connection pooling for SMB and SFTP storage locations with a configurable number of maximum threads — useful for SFTP providers that limit the number of simultaneous connections

Option to start a backup as soon as a volume is connected to the computer

Next Steps

If you read this far, thanks! Head to arqbackup.com to see screen shots and download a free trial. Go