Backup 3.0 Observations

Nik (apparently) - 08:31am Sep 21, 2005 PST
via email

Backup 3.0 is a very nice update for the under-featured backup
software. The ability to make arbitrary groups of files back up to
just about any media is quite welcome indeed. I was hoping that this
update would let me forego a planned purchase of Retrospect Desktop,
but it has a few glaring inadequacies compared to the more mature
Retrospect.

Here's a summary of problems/bugs I've discovered:

Firstly, burning to a CD or DVD requires enough disk space on your
drive to create a disk image of the target media. That means that you
EITHER need as much free space on your drive as you're backing up, or
enough free space to fill one disc. For CDs, no big deal, that's 700
MB tops, but for DVDs, keeping nearly 5 gigs free might be a
challenge for some users. (Myself included.)

Backup to HD works fine, but network backup isn't quite there yet.
Network backup WORKS, but only if the target backup location is
already mounted. Backup 3 will not mount a remote drive in order to
back up to it. If you don't have the network drive mounted, it will
churn (endlessly?) waiting for the volume to be mounted, and then
start the backup as soon as the volume appears. Presumably this is
the same way it will act if an external HD isn't available.

The spotlight search in order to create a backup target is a great
idea. What I thought it did, based on the description, was use smart
folder/saved search criteria to define a backup. That way you could,
for example, back up all files with a certain Finder label. As it
turns out, all it does is let you search as a plain search and then
select any/all the items in the search results and add them to the
backup set.

Without any ability to filter based on flexible criteria (label, file
name, etc...), backup is pretty much an all-or-nothing option for any
given folder. That's good enough for a lot of people, but if you need
more powerful backups, you're better off looking elsewhere.

However, it does finally give users the ability to make incremental
backups to optical media, make full backups to hard drives (not sure
if they'd be bootable clones or not), and adds flexible scheduling to
all these options. This is enough to BARELY meet the basic features
in "Take Control of MacOS X Backups," and is probably enough for a
large number of users.

Me, I think I'll just have to go buy Retrospect.

--Nik