Best Backup Program for Mac?

Rhuarc

A friend of mine recently almost lost 1TB of photos and video because he hadn't backed anything up. I want to get him set up with an automated backup plan from an internal 1TB drive to an external 1TB drive. He has a G5. I am looking for software that will allow automatic backups to the external based off of criteria that I am able to set. It would be nice to be able to set up multiple back up plans as well, meaning that depending on which external drive is plugged in it will automatically backup certain file sets.

I found the following site that lists the top 10 backup solutions for Mac. Any suggestions from real life users here? http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/10-best-backup-and-recovery-software/

Thanks everyone!

ivar

I use both the #1 and #2 solution (timemachine and backup), have set it up, and have never looked back. Everything happens automatically, works great. I have no need for something else.

colourbox

Your requirements are rather specialized in nature, so a lot of the consumer-level solutions like Time Machine are going to be too basic to be able to fulfill them. Of the items in that list that I'm somewhat familiar with, I'm guessing that you'll want to take a look at Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, and Retrospect because I think that they may be able to handle the automation and custom scripting that will probably be necessary to achieve exactly what you want.

I use Time Machine and SuperDuper myself.

Andy

http://www.backblaze.com

Wachel

I use super duper and love it. I set it and forget it. I use it to make a backup of my entire drive that I can even start my computer from. You can also just select file or folders to back up. You can also back up to more than one drive.

Every night at 1am mine backs up. Transparent to me.

CatOne

Wachel wrote:

I use super duper and love it. I set it and forget it. I use it to make a backup of my entire drive that I can even start my computer from. You can also just select file or folders to back up. You can also back up to more than one drive.

Every night at 1am mine backs up. Transparent to me.

The downside, here, is that you have no archive. If you delete or corrupt a file on your main drive, the change is propagated to your "backup" drive at 1 AM that night. So, you basically have a few hours to notice you've "accidentally" deleted something that you will later want.

I'd encourage you to integrate something like Time Machine into your backup solution as well, which maintains archives. Sooner or later, you will REALLY want to get back a file you deleted because you thought you would NEVER need it again.

colourbox

What I do is I switch out my SuperDuper backup hard drive periodically and swap it with another drive kept off site. I agree, one backup is not enough, and one backup that is too recent is not good enough to avoid getting screwed by not having an old enough copy of a file before it got corrupted or deleted. That's kind of why Time Machine is my other layer. It keeps multiple versions.

DavidTO

I use SuperDuper!, Time Machine and Backblaze.