Mac OS X Hacks

Taking the Bite Out of Backup

With a confusing array of backup solutions for Mac OS X, we pick out a couple of our favorites: Apple’s Backup and the open source, Perl-based psync.

Backup is the bane of anybody’s computer existence. You know it’s an integral part of data hygiene — not unlike flossing, in fact. But it’s late, you have a presentation in the morning, and you’re too busy creating data to bother finding a CD or some extra hard drive space to shove a backup set onto. Not that you’d know what and how to back up in the first place.

Many of the available software applications don’t work as advertised, are complicated when they shouldn’t be, don’t restore as one would hope during your time of need, and are often expensive to boot. Online backup always sounds like a good idea; and it is, for reasonably sized data sets, meaning not mine and probably yours.

Backup proves such a pain that you never really think about it until it’s too late — again, much like flossing.

So what’s a data hog to do?

.Mac’s Backup

Backup (http://www.mac.com/1/iTour/tour_backup.html), .Mac’s free personal backup software, has the simplicity you’ve been craving in a backup application.

It sports an intuitive iApp-style interface and an intelligent QuickPicks feature to help you identify important files and locate them on your hard drive for you rather than the hunt-and-peck of lesser backup programs. You can back up to CD or DVD, even spanning multiple CDs or DVDs should your important data be just ...