Arq Backup

What Arq Backup actually is

Arq is backup software for a Mac or a Windows PC that sends encrypted, versioned backups to storage you already own. It is not a storage service and not a cloud: Arq writes to Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, Google Drive, Google Cloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, SharePoint, Wasabi, SFTP servers, MinIO, other S3-compatible endpoints, external hard drives and NAS shares — or to several of those at once. The design decision underneath everything is that the vendor never holds your data, and that decision is why we follow the product at all.

The company behind it is Haystack Software LLC in Lexington, Massachusetts, founded by Stefan Reitshamer in 2005. Arq itself has been sold since 2009, and the firm describes itself as self-funded, owner-operated and profitable — a rarer posture in the backup market than it should be. Haystack launched a hosted variant (Arq Cloud Backup) in 2018, then merged it into Arq Premium in 2020.

The mechanics are what experienced users expect from a serious file backup tool. Backups are block-level incremental with compression and de-duplication, so repeated runs move only changed blocks. Arq uses filesystem snapshot technology to capture a consistent point-in-time view even while files are changing. It keeps a backup history — multiple versions of every file — so a corrupted file, an accidental deletion or a ransomware encryptor can be rolled back to a known-good version. Retention is unlimited: it will keep backups of a USB drive you never reconnect. Scheduling runs hourly or daily, with controls for bandwidth caps, battery state, specific Wi-Fi networks and per-folder exclusions.

Encryption is end-to-end: data is encrypted on your machine before upload and only you hold the keys. That is the whole point of the product — the storage provider stores opaque blocks. For anyone comparing against the /category/backup-solutions field here, this is the model we prefer in principle: vendor breaches and subpoena exposure at the storage provider do not read your files.

Pricing: what you really pay

Two products, and the difference matters.

Arq 7 is a one-time purchase at $59.99 per computer. That is the app only — no cloud storage included — and it covers Mac or PC. The license is yours forever; it includes 12 months of app updates. After that first year, continued updates cost $25 per year per computer ($40 for the family pack), and that subscription is optional: skip it and the version you own keeps working, with no nagging if you turn off update notifications in preferences. There is no penalty for buying a later year of updates whenever a feature actually matters to you. This is one of the more honest upgrade policies we have seen in this category.

Arq Premium is the subscription variant: the same app for up to 5 computers plus 1 TB of Arq-hosted cloud storage and secure web access to your backups, at $6.99/month or 69.99/year. Over the 1 TB, storage is billed per GB per month. For households and small teams that do not want to manage an S3 account, this is the pragmatic route — though it trades away the "you own the destination" property that makes Arq distinctive.

What you actually pay over time, in our view: for one computer with your own Backblaze or Wasabi account, expect $59.99 up front plus a few dollars a month of storage, and nothing else unless you want new features after year one. Compare that with subscription backup services at $70–$120 per year, per machine, forever. Over five years the Arq 7 route is dramatically cheaper for anyone comfortable holding an S3-compatible account. A 30-day free trial is available; there is no permanent free tier.

Performance & infrastructure

There is nothing to benchmark here in the server sense — Arq is a desktop agent, and throughput is bounded by your machine, your uplink and the storage provider you pick. We have not run our /benchmarks suite against it and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can say from the product design: block-level incremental with de-duplication means the steady-state upload is small after the first full pass, and bandwidth scheduling lets you keep the pipe usable during the working day.

The infrastructure conversation for Arq is really a conversation about your destination. Choose S3 or Wasabi and you inherit eleven-nines durability numbers, regional placement and lifecycle rules from that provider; choose a NAS in your closet and you inherit your own fire risk. Arq supports multiple destinations per backup plan, which is the cheapest real disaster recovery available to an individual: push the same encrypted stream to a cloud account and to a local disk, and neither failure mode kills you. Geographic data residency is therefore your choice, not Arq's — a feature if you need EU-only storage for GDPR reasons, and a responsibility you have to configure correctly.

A second infrastructural choice worth pricing in: restore traffic. Pulling a terabyte back from S3 or Wasabi after a disaster costs real money at most providers, and Arq will happily restore from whichever destination you point it at — so keeping one local copy alongside the cloud copy saves both time and egress when the failure is a dropped laptop rather than a house fire. Storage format transparency deserves a mention: Arq stores backups in an open, documented format rather than a proprietary blob, so restore does not require Arq to still exist as a company. In a category where vendors quietly disappear, that is the kind of detail we weight heavily.

Where it falls short

Desktop only. Arq runs on macOS and Windows; there is no Linux or server agent, so it will not back up your VPS fleet or your NAS operating system. The database row we inherited calls this out and it is correct: if you need server backups, this is not the tool.

Destination costs are separate and ongoing. The one-time license price is easy to quote and easy to mislead yourself with — S3 request pricing and egress on restore are real, and high-frequency access patterns to expensive storage classes add up. We would rather the marketing said this louder.

The product covers files, not disk images. There is no bare-metal recovery, no system restore environment, and no imaging — restore gets your files back onto a fresh OS install, not your machine as it was. Users expecting Time Machine-style whole-volume recovery will be disappointed.

Support is a small company's support: email to a founder-led team that answers (the pricing FAQ commits to making things right whether or not your updates window has expired), but there is no published uptime SLA, no phone line and no enterprise support tier. For a $59.99 product that is reasonable; for someone planning to rely on it for business continuity, pair it with your own restore drills.

Finally, the Arq Premium variant dilutes the pitch. Once backups live on Arq's own storage, the vendor-neutrality argument weakens and you should evaluate it like any hosted backup service — with questions about where that 1 TB physically sits, which Arq does not publish prominently.

Who should pick this

Our pick for individuals, families and small teams who are comfortable owning their storage account and want to stop paying rent on backup software. Mac users in particular: Arq picks up macOS metadata properly and has been doing so long enough that the sharp edges are gone, and it runs natively on Apple Silicon as well as Intel. It also suits anyone with more than one destination in mind — the multi-target plans mean a NAS plus a cloud account costs nothing extra beyond the storage itself. It is also the right shape for anyone with compliance-adjacent needs — lawyers, clinicians, developers with client data — who want encryption keys and storage location under their own control.

We would not pick it for fleet or server backup, for users who want plug-and-play with zero cloud accounts (pick a managed service and eat the subscription), or for anyone needing whole-machine image recovery.

Key takeaways

• Arq 7 is a one-time $59.99 per computer for the app alone; you supply the storage (S3, B2, Wasabi, Google Drive, SFTP, NAS and more).
• Updates are included for 12 months, then $25/year per computer ($40 family pack) — optional, and the app keeps working without it.
• Arq Premium bundles the app for up to 5 computers with 1 TB of hosted storage at $6.99/month or $69.99/year.
• End-to-end encryption with your own keys, block-level incremental backups, de-duplication and unlimited version history.
• Backups live in an open, documented format at a destination you choose — no vendor lock-in and no dependency on Arq surviving.
• macOS and Windows desktops only: no Linux agent, no server backup, no disk imaging, no published SLA.

Sources

• https://www.arqbackup.com/
• https://www.arqbackup.com/pricing/
• https://cloud.arqbackup.com/purchase
• https://www.arqbackup.com/documentation/arq7/English.lproj/arq7Pricing.html
• https://www.arqbackup.com/about/
• https://www.arqbackup.com/press