BackityMac: Easily Back Up Your Home Folder… and More
This sounds useful… I still haven’t settled on a backup strategy for my whole system. But I’d really like to be able to take my home setup with me to the office. Since I don’t have a laptop, that means synching in some way. I’ll see if this is easy and quick enough to do the trick. The freeware BackityMac also has some system optimization tasks in its bag of tricks.
Update 5/18/06. Finally getting around to trying this out today… a few updates have made the software even more useful, if it works as advertised. First, for $10 you can upgrade to a version that will let you backup to CD’s or DVD’s, and second, BackityMac now has a scheduling feature. At the moment, I’ve chosen the option (one checkbox) to backup my Home folder, and we’ll see how that goes… More later.
Update 2/19/07. Last year, I concluded that BackityMac wasn’t flexible enough for my rather idiosyncratic file system. BackityMac would be fine for a managed user who never strays from putting files neatly in the places Apple has provided. But if you’ve ever partioned your hard disk and put your user folder on another partition, or perhaps linked your Library folder somewhere from there, BackityMac will get confused real fast. Besides, I was more interested in a synchronization tool than simple backup, and that’s not something BackityMac can do. If I were to choose today between this and the newly updated Carbon Copy Cloner, that’s a no-brainer. CCC has years of experience doing this kind of thing and a lot more flexibility to customize the experience. Plus, it can make bootable CD’s for you for free, whereas BackityMac wants $10 for the privilege.
One more thing… The developer sells BackityMac partly on its ability to migrate your “home” data to another Mac. But surely Mac users know by now that you no longer need a third-party tool for this. Apple’s built-in Migration Assistant is one of the best things about using Mac OS X: You can very easily migrate data from one Mac to another. The only people who might need this capability are the few stuck with very old hardware that doesn’t have a FireWire cable.
Actually, there’s one more last thing… One of the reasons my interest in backup software waned last year is that Apple’s new operating system, Leopard, will incorporate a system called Time Machine that I’m betting will take care of backing up all of my home data–as well as any other stuff I want it to manage–quite nicely. Backup software developers are going to have to work real hard to draw users from Time Machine if it’s as good as everyone thinks it’ll be. However, Time Machine won’t do synchronization… that’ll still be a useful third-party function.
Version as tested: 1.3.6.
