I’ve been using Bitcasa as a cloud backup solution as I work for about 16 months now. Initially they were great, I’d synced about 260gb of photos and work data to them before I left the UK and everything was running smoothly. I felt secure that my laptop backups were working and my data was safe in case of user error or laptop theft.
Then Bitcasa deleted all the data I’d backed up in November 2014 as they were re-architecting their backend.
I gave them the benefit of the doubt and then whilst in Asia spent a good 4 or so months backing up my data, contacting support reporting issues, working with new client versions as they fixed bugs and rebooting my laptop, a lot. I don’t think Bitcasa became a working backup solution for me until February/March 2015, then I relaxed again.
Recently I’ve noticed my laptop fans have been spinning up like crazy and the laptop getting super hot whilst I’m doing non-cpu intensive tasks, so I had a look at the Activity Monitor.
I can’t deal with this any more
After contacting Bitcasa again they put me on another reinstall/reboot support cycle and I really can’t be bothered. So I looked around.
Arq
As I was browsing for WordPress themes I saw Envato had put together a Creative Bundle for the Mac, that included Arq Backup and the value was awesome, $39 for $1500 worth of software so I decided to buy it and try Arq out. It’s been amazing.
Arq offers many different backup destination options, including Google Drive, Amazon S3/Glacier etc but also SFTP to your own remote server. I’ve several of them including a dedicated backup server with TBs of free space so using that was a no brainer.
Here in Spain I have pretty fast 50mb/s Internet and about 290GB of data I need to back up, it took roughly a week to do in total, what with pausing the back up, suspending my laptop and even rebooting it. But you know what? Arq has been 100% rock solid stable the entire time, using minimal CPU and just working away in the background with out disturbing me. Amazing.
The killer though, is rather than spiking my CPU to 100% and making my laptop unusable every hour when it does a new backup sync, it just sits their doing its thing. A new sync only takes a minute, as you can see from the screenshot from the results of the backup that kicked off at 12:00 earlier today.
Bitcasa has actually been disabled for over a month due to the fact with it running I’m unable to actually do any work to generate new artifacts that require a backup. It’s shit. And their behaviour last November is just the icing on the cake. I’m ok with giving people a chance, but as the adage goes
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Backup solutions should be easy to configure and then just work, forever. It’s early days and my backups are now only on a raid array, on my infrastructure, rather than scattered across multiple different servers in a cloud infrastructure as Bitcasa offered, but I have working, versioned online backups again to go with the external HDD backups that I seemingly do only once every 2 months.
You know what’s better than cloud backup storage providor that doesn’t work properly and happily deletes your data? Arq.