I’ve been testing Arq for backing up my files from my Mac at home to Amazon’s S3 Glacier service. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time now, but finally got around to trying it out. I created a backup set that archives:

• Desktop
• Documents
• Movies
• Music
• Pictures

Arq is set to incrementally back up the files in each of these locations at 1:00 am every morning. It looks like it takes Arq anywhere from 10 to 17 minutes to process the changes and upload.

iCloud, which I pay for for the whole family, does a nice job already of handling Desktop, Documents, and my Photos library. I also have a Samsung T3 drive plugged into my Mac for Time Machine backups. I do occassionally make vidoes and store other files and projects in Movies and Music, so I thought having an offsite backup would be smart. It’s backing up about 36 GB of data, much of which (22 GB) is my Photos library.

Arq Activity Log

The upide of Glacier is that it’s cheap to store data there. The downsides are slowness of downloading your files, and cost of doing so. Arq has an older but informative post on the matter. I don’t expect to have to need to restore files from Glacier. If I have to, though, it’s good to know that I can.