Regarding Arq backup: if you are worried about using a proprietary (enrypted) and closed-source backup format in case the company were to go under, they have an open source command-line restore tool:
I always find it interesting to compare 4TB/month pricing against buying N 4TB hard drives yourself, where N is the desired redundancy. Typically, you could buy a fresh set of hard drives 2-3x per year for the "standard" (they don't even call it "premium") storage tier. A normal drive lasts 5 years: go figure. (The markup was about double ten years ago, so it has gotten more competitive already.)
Of course, that's not entirely apples to apples because they save you labor time, but I find it an interesting baseline comparison, also because their labor is divided over a hundred thousand customers and approximates to zero per customer.
Another thing people tend to forget is that it's a backup copy, not your only. You don't need the premium storage if you keep the original copy around anyway and the odds of 3 unrelated drives (1 at home, 2 off-site) dying at the same time are probably better than you getting into a car crash this year. I did have 2 die at the same time: same make and model, nearly identical serial numbers, surprise: same crash date and crash behavior (few KB/s sequential read speeds for a while, but strangely no data was corrupted, before entirely crashing).
>I did have 2 die at the same time: same make and model, nearly identical serial numbers, surprise: same crash date and crash behavior
Out of curiosity, were those Seagate drives?
I bought a couple of Seagate 3TB (spinning rust) SAS drives some years ago, and they both died within a couple weeks of each other after only a few months.
FTR I tried looking it up in chat histories and found the month in which it must have happened, but didn't spot any messages of mine that mentioned the brand :(
I also had two crash almost at the same time, both seagate with similar serials. This was about 20 years ago though, now I don't buy more than one harddrive at a time.
What’s the best open source file and backup managemen tool that can upload to AWS and GCP cloud storage, with integrity checking and with pre-upload encryption? I don’t want to start writing one only to discover a powerful thing that already exists in the OSS community and is trusted.
I use Restic [0] for my personal backups and I use Backblaze for the backend, but AWS S3 and anything compatible (of which Backblaze is too) is also an option. I preencrypt all my data and use pass for managing my encryption password and the secrets.
https://github.com/arqbackup/arq_restore
I've been using Arq for years, but I need to look into the "Glacier Deep Archive" format which is about 1/20th the cost of the fastest storage class.