Arq review: your own storage, your own keys

Arq sells you the backup program and nothing else. You supply the place the backups go, and you set the password that locks them. That's the pitch, and it's the opposite of Backblaze's one-box approach.

What you buy

Arq's pricing page (checked Nov 1, 2026) shows two products. Arq 7 is $59.99 per computer, app only, "use your own cloud storage," on Mac or Windows. Arq Premium is $69.99 a year for 5 computers and 1 TB of included storage, which works out to $5.83 a month on the yearly plan. Extra storage is billed at $.00699 per GB per month.

Arq 7 is a license you keep. The pricing FAQ says you keep the app you bought forever, with one free year of updates. After that it's $25 per computer per year, or $40 for the family pack. Auto-renew is optional, and the FAQ says you won't be nagged if you decline.

That is the catch. A lifetime license is not a lifetime of updates.

Where backups can go

The Storage Locations page lists AWS S3 and Glacier, Backblaze B2, Dropbox, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive, OneDrive, pCloud, SFTP, SharePoint, Storj, Wasabi, SMB or AFP network volumes, external disks and S3-compatible services such as Minio. The home page says you can back up to several at once.

So a NAS in the cupboard plus a cloud bucket is a normal setup.

The encryption password

When you create a backup plan, the documentation says to choose a password and that Arq then encrypts data before sending it. The password "will never leave your computer." For cloud locations Arq strongly recommends turning encryption on.

My reading: if the password never leaves your machine, Arq can't recover it for you either. Write it down somewhere other than the backed-up computer. That is an inference, not something the page spells out.

What it keeps

The home page lists versioned backups, so you can pull an older copy of a corrupted or ransomware-encrypted file. It also lists block-level incremental backup, no limit on file size or type, and backups of USB drives kept even if you never reconnect them. You choose hourly or daily runs, bandwidth limits, battery rules and which Wi-Fi networks to avoid.

The home page says Arq uses filesystem snapshot technology for point-in-time backups, even while files change. A customer quote there cites the Arq 7 changelog as saying the team worked with Apple on native APFS snapshot support. Restores happen inside the app, with no zip files to download.

Backups sit in an open, documented format, and there's an open-source restore tool called arq_restore. If Haystack Software vanished, your data would still be readable.

Against Backblaze

Backblaze (see our Backblaze review) costs $8.25 a month on its yearly plan for one computer with unlimited storage. Arq Premium is $5.83 for 5 computers and 1 TB. Different shapes. A photographer with 4 TB on one machine pays extra storage on Premium, or a provider's rate on Arq 7. Someone with three small laptops does better on Arq.

Premium also adds web access to your backups. Our backup for photographers roundup does the large-library maths, and the Time Machine alternatives piece covers the offsite-copy case.

Rough edges

Mac and Windows only. The pricing page lists nothing for Linux. The home page also still carries a banner for a World Backup Day sale that ended 31 March 2021. It's harmless. The same page lists Mac version 7.50 released 6 Oct 2026 and Windows 7.49.0.0 on 28 Sep 2026, so the product itself is still being updated.

Verdict

Buy Arq 7 if you want to own the keys and already have storage. Take Premium if you'd rather have one bill. Command-line fans can also look at Kopia backups to cloud storage. Plan details are on the Arq page, checked November 1, 2026.