Many options for backing up your data exist on Mac OS X, and with the introduction of Leopard's Time Machine, many users will never need to venture out into the wild west of backup software again. However, for users with more specific needs, software such as Apple's Backup (included with a .Mac subscription) fills an important niche.
Backup allows you to create multiple backup plans making it easy to preserve only the data you are currently worried about. When creating a plan, simple presets such as "Home Folder" and "Personal Data & Settings" can be chosen, or customize your own plan to include or exclude specific files and folders. There are also many preset data types which can be chosen including "Keychain", "iTunes Purchases", and "Pages Documents". Backup can even perform a Spotlight search at backup time to gather all files with certain characteristics; i.e., all documents containing a certain word or phrase. After choosing the files, add as many schedules and destinations for the plan as desired. For example, you can have the plan backup to your iDisk once a week and to a CD or DVD once a month. When manually performing a backup, it's easy to pick which device the backup should go to, and if you choose something too big to fit on a single CD or DVD, Backup will prompt you to insert more media as necessary.
The only immediately obvious drawback of Backup is the fact that only one backup plan can be executing at a time; it's not possible to start several simultaneous backups. Some people have also complained about the way Backup stores your files in a package, but you can always delve into the package by right-clicking on it and choosing "Show Package Contents". For the author, Backup is almost a good enough solution to justify the cost of .Mac on its own.
A free demo of Backup is available when you sign up for a .Mac trial, but it limits you to only 100 MB of backup data at a time.
- By Apple Inc.
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- .Mac
