Great question. More details coming out soon on our mailing list and Twitter---and there's so many factors to consider---but in short, Relica:

- is designed for consumers who are not technically skilled

- works on Linux and BSD (I don't think Arq does)

- offers redundant cloud storage with up to 5 providers, and requires only a single upload of the data as compared to uploading it 5 times

- allows you to backup to local disk, friends' computers (or your own) running Relica (with authorization of course), or the cloud, which is totally managed by us so non-technical users can use it

Relica also does client-side encryption and deduplication, of course. Backups can also be restored directly with restic (open source), without requiring a reliance on Relica.

Basically, Relica is a good balance of "user-friendly" combined with features for power users.

>offers redundant cloud storage with up to 5 providers, and requires only a single upload of the data as compared to uploading it 5 times

How does that work?

We replicate your upload after it leaves your computer (at the packet level - we can't decrypt your data, we don't even have the key for it). There were quite a few technical hurdles we had to overcome to make this work, but I gotta admit, it's really cool to see it in action. :)

I recognise that username! Hello.

This does raise the question of how fast the upload will be - how's your network?

Switching from Dropbox to OneDrive doubled my upload speed simply because there's better peering from my ISP to Akamai vs whatever Dropbox was using at the time.

Hi there! Our upload infrastructure is designed to scale to anywhere in the world where we decide to put up relays. That makes the speed variable depending on where you are and where the relay is. We are still testing on our staging infrastructure and haven't deployed to our production networks yet, so it's hard to say right now what our speeds will be. But I'd love to know more about what your speeds are like now and what you expect with your backup service. Could you tweet at either me (@mholt6), @relicabackup, or email support-at-relicabackup.com and I'll get back to you on that?