This week CrashPlan announced they were ending consumer services, so I had to replace it with something else. Backups are one of those things at the unpleasant intersection of tedious, difficult, and important.

A quick spin around the latest alternatives showed the usual spectrum of possibilities, ranging from perl hackers implementing rsync themselves, to slick consumer tools. I need to have something working well not just on my computer, but others in my family, so I went the consumerish route.

Arq backing up to Wasabi seems like a good choice for polish and price.

One thing I always struggle with: how to ensure my stuff is backed up, without needlessly copying around all the crap that ends up in my home directory that I don’t need backed up. On a Mac, the ~/Library directory has all sorts of stuff that I think I don’t need to copy around. Do I need these?:

• Library/Application Support
• Library/Caches
• Library/Containers

I add these directories to the exclusions. Should my Dropbox folder get backed up? Isn’t that what Dropbox is already doing?

Then as a developer, there’s tons more to exclude. Running VirtualBox? You have have a 10Gb disk image somewhere under your home. I have something like 20,000 .pyc files. The .tox directory for coverage.py is 350Mb.

So I also exclude these:

• .git
• .hg
• .svn
• .tox
• node_modules
• .local
• .npm
• .vagrant.d
• .vmdk
• .bundle
• .cache
• .heroku
• .rbenv
• .gem
• *.pyc
• *.pyo
• *$py.class

Of course, as a native Mac app for consumers, Arq doesn’t provide a way that I can supply all these once, I have to fiddle with GUI + and - buttons, and enter them one at a time...

Lastly, some files don’t seem comfortable with backups. Thunderbird’s storage files are large, and while Arq copies only certain byte ranges, they still amount to about 300Mb each time. Should I even back up my email? Should I still be using Thunderbird? Too many uncertainties....