Backing Up Your Mac Files Can Be Easy. Just Click!

April, 2009

By: Jeffrey Mincey

As a Mac user you come to appreciate the Mac's ease of use and the ability of OS X and Mac applications to just do the job.

When it comes to backing up your Mac's valuable files the choices of good utilities grows every day. Clone your Mac. Buy another hard drive for Time Machine. Buy a stack of CDs or DVDs. Use an online service.

These choices come with another layer of complexity and management effort. Some Mac users may not want the expense of an extra hard drive (difficult for notebook users) or the expense of an online service.

Other Mac users may not have 200 gigabytes of valuable files whereby CDs and DVDs become a good option for offline storage of important files and documents.

Since there's no shortage of Mac utilities to help you back up your Mac's files, let me focus on the highly rated Get Backup from BeLight.

While this is not the least expensive solution for Mac back ups, Get Backup makes storing files quite easy. Importantly, restoring files is even easier.

We call our Macs elegant, intuitive, even graceful, especially when it comes to handling more mundane yet important work—browsing, email, chat, photos, music, movies. Saving all those files from a disaster should be an elegant, graceful proposition, too.

Get Backup is a simple utility that does two things. It makes it easy to save files and easy to restore your files. What else do you need? How about automatically?

You may not want or need the complexity, capacity, and expense of multiple hard drives or a stack disks to store files. Sometimes, it's not even easy to know which files to back up on a Mac, since OS X scatters important files all over the place.

Get Backup seems to give you more choices. You can back up files across a network, on CDs or DVDs, or even other USB or Firewire hard drives connected to your Mac. You can also select which files from which applications to back up.

iPhoto, iTunes, Address Book, Mail and others are easy to select and add to your back up management process.

But what process would be elegant and simple without an automated scheduler and Get Backup does that, too. If you back up different ways to different devices, Get Backup can handle multiple schedules.

Choose from a complete back up—every file gets stored—or a version back up where every file gets stored separately from previously stored versions. Or, choose an incremental back up which only saves the most recent changes to files.

Not only does Get Backup make complex back ups simple to set up and schedule, restoring is just as easy, and a few clicks away should you need to find your files after a problem.

My only beef with Get Backup is the cost, considerably more than SuperDuper! or Chronosync, our favorite back up duos. Yet, Get Backup is actually easier to use. SuperDuper!'s clone operation is elegant, but changing settings can become massively complex.

Complexity is not what Get Backup is about. Simple, straightforward, secure, scheduled back ups.

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