loonyblog.

Apple (finally!) makes Backup useful.

Hallelujah...Apple has finally made Backup, the self-describing utility for .Mac users into a useful piece of software. When I joined .Mac last year it was for four reasons:

1. That sweet, sweet integration with iPhoto
2. The obligatory virus scan software
3. The ability to easily share files between my home and office macs
4. An easy-to-use way for scheduling regular backups.

Of these I've loved the iPhoto integration (especially when posting photos for family members), I've been very satisfied with the ability to share files between macs (especially since iSync came out) and felt reassured by the fact that I was virus-scanning every one of the many thousands of files I download (even if it has never even remotely caught anything). But it's been that last one that's been the low-point of the service.

Backup sounded great on paper: it melds Apple's sense of simplicity in software design with the very important task of backing up files on a regular basis. Unfortunately, when it was released the program was crippled to the point of sheer uselessness. While you could backup anything you want, and it was quite easy to create new backup sets, you could only backup files to CDs/DVDs or your iDisk. I have made a few hard-media backups, but by and large what I want to do is backup to my internal network server on a weekly basis.

As of this morning, I can actually do that. Backup finally lets you do what it should have done from the beginning: back up to whatever you want. It now supports network disks, firewire drives, and even iPods (if you're lucky enough to own one with enough free space to make that possible).

This has made the decision to renew my .Mac subscription much, much easier. Sure I can just set up my own shell script and cron job to back up to a network drive (that's what I've been doing) but this is a much more elegant solution, and it backs up to standard OS X package files for easy reference. It's a long-awaited update and I'm going to start using it immediately.

Posted by jason at September 4, 2003 12:19 PM | TrackBack | Read more: Apple