Cloud storage decision
Arq Premium
A focused, CLI-first encrypted backup to S3/B2 (core loop) is realistic for a single engineer in ~1 week, but reproducing Arq Premium's full product (GUI, managed storage, OS snapshot integration, web restores, and years of polish/support) is not practical to fully match.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- Scan files, chunk/deduplicate, encrypt client-side, upload chunks to object storage, record backup metadata and versions, restore files from stored chunks.
What it still won’t have
- Polished cross-platform GUI with integrated web access
- Arq-managed integrated cloud storage and billing
- Deep OS integration (e.g., APFS snapshot support)
- Decades of product hardening, customer support, and edge-case handling
- Built-in multi-destination orchestration and enterprise polish
What remains hard
- Brand trust
The result is a brand trusted by 100,000+ people and organizations to protect their files.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal cross-platform backup client in Go that backs up a single computer to S3-compatible object storage. Include: filesystem crawler, content-addressed chunker with deduplication, LZ4 compression, client-side AES-256 encryption (user-supplied passphrase), resumable multipart uploads to S3/B2, local SQLite metadata DB storing backup records and version pointers, and a CLI with commands: init, backup, list-versions, restore <timestamp>. Out of scope: GUI, multi-destination orchestration, APFS snapshot integration, hosted web UI. Require: error handling for partial uploads, retry/backoff, basic unit tests for chunker/encryptor, and integration test that uploads to a local S3 simulator (minio).
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score67
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productArq product page
- official pricingArq pricing
- official docsArq data format documentation
- open sourcerustic-rs/rustic
- open sourceduplicati/duplicati
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
