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Arius is a command-line tool that manages archival to and restoration from Azure Blob Storage. It exposes two commands:

archive

Scan a local directory, encrypt and deduplicate its contents, and upload them to Azure Blob Storage. Leaves small pointer files locally so the directory structure remains visible.

restore

Reconstruct local files from an Arius repository. Supports pointer-only synchronization as well as full binary download, including rehydration from Archive tier.

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Global help

Run arius --help to see available commands and version information: 
arius --help
Run arius <command> --help for command-specific usage: 
arius archive --help
arius restore --help

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Environment variables

Both commands support environment variables as fallbacks for credentials. If a CLI flag is explicitly passed, it takes precedence over the environment variable. For automation and CI pipelines, setting environment variables is the recommended approach to avoid passing secrets on the command line.
VariableApplies toDescription
ARIUS_ACCOUNT_NAMEarchive, restoreAzure Storage Account name. Equivalent to --accountname / -n.
ARIUS_ACCOUNT_KEYarchive, restoreAzure Storage Account key. Equivalent to --accountkey / -k.
When an environment variable is set, you can omit the corresponding flag on the command line: 
export ARIUS_ACCOUNT_NAME=mystorageaccount
export ARIUS_ACCOUNT_KEY=base64encodedkey==

arius archive /data/photos \
  --passphrase "my secret phrase" \
  --container arius-backups

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Logging

Arius writes structured logs to disk automatically:
  • Native CLI: logs are written to %LOCALAPPDATA%/Arius/logs/ on Windows.
  • Docker: logs are written to /logs inside the container. Mount a host directory to /logs to persist them.
Each run produces a timestamped log file named arius-<yyyyMMdd_HHmmss>.log.

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