#ARQ BACKUP DELETE FILES SOFTWARE#
#ARQ BACKUP DELETE FILES MAC#

Each page takes about an hour of work to create. This is a bit dicey when our business relies on getting all pages to the printers by the early evening. Local backups were relatively infrequent and could result in hours of data loss. Hopefully you can spot the problems - both the ones inherent in the strategy and the ones that result from poor performance: Host our internal (unloved and little-used) wiki.Run OS X Server to handle user log-in (for access to files only).Serve files on the local network over AFP (to fewer than 25 users).Which is odd, really, because its only tasks were:

#ARQ BACKUP DELETE FILES SOFTWARE#

Both are solid pieces of software (though it was an older version of Arq, v3 I think) so the blame does lie with the machine. It wasn’t rare to log in to the server to find a SuperDuper copy having run for 12 hours and still going, or that Arq had hung and needed its agent restarted. It was totally competent serving files over AFP but trying to work on the machine itself was a nightmare.Īnd this is the point where it gets concerning.

You’ll have noticed some fuzziness in my recollections just there, for an important reason: the machine’s performance was so poor everything bled into each other. The SuperDuper copies were done to a set of USB 2 disk enclosures, containing ordinary 3.5″ drives. Arq backups to (old-style) Glacier vaults, once a day.Weekly SuperDuper erase-and-copy on Saturday to both the three-ish-hourly mirrors and the daily mirrors.Daily SuperDuper copies (newer files) to two drives (in RAID 1) at about 9pm, Sunday–Friday.SuperDuper! copies (newer files) to two drives (in RAID 1) at - if I remember correctly - 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 5pm, 9pm, Sunday–Friday.Two 500GB drives in the Mini itself, in RAID 1 (mirrored).For context, our working day is roughly 10am-7pm Sunday–Friday: In this, I’m going to include RAID because the redundancy side of things also changes. The final straw for me was being unable to trust that the backups would run reliably.Įver since I got my current post (in mid-2014) I’d been meaning to overhaul our backup strategy but it was always a case of “I’ll do it when we replace the server.” It’s worth sketching out what we were doing before moving on to what caused concern and what I’ve replaced it with now. In any case, we got to a point where the machine needed swapping. That wasn’t ideal and part of the reason why I hadn’t replaced it sooner was because I was waiting for Apple to at least refresh the specs.

#ARQ BACKUP DELETE FILES MAC#

At work I’m responsible for our office file server, which is mostly used for storing the InDesign pages and related files we need to produce the paper every day.Īt the end of 2016 we replaced the server, which was a 2010 or 2011 Mac Mini, with a “current” Mac Mini - the 2014 release.

Arq backup delete files