MacBackup Review
MacBackup was on the shelf at the Apple store. I really don’t want to pay for Retrospect and I have a shell script that I use that works pretty well for me. It’s a little slow, but I wrote it, I understand it, and as I said: It works. So, for $30 I took the plunge and bought MacBackup. The problems with the software became apparent when I got home.
Let the Beatings Begin
First, I wanted to set up a backup set that would happen every Sunday morning around 2:00 am. Ope
ned up the manual as any RTFMer will do and low-and-behold I can’t do that yet. The manual states that I have to actually run a backup before I can set that backup on a recurring schedule. I, for the life of me, cannot understand why this is necessary but I am not the most skilled Cocoa programmer (that would be Kevin) so off to begin a backup I go. This leads to my next problem with the software: choosing what to backup.
I understand what the developer wanted to do; I just don’t think it was executed well. When I create a backup set, I would like the ability to include everything here except a certain file or files. If I say include everything on the desktop, I mean everything on the desktop. If the desktop content later changes, then capture any new files or remove the ones that no longer exist. I must add a disclaimer here that will spoil the ending, but I never did complete a backup set so t
he addition and removal of files may actually work — I was just unable to test it.
Backup Modes
There are different modes that you can use to backup and restore information: Easy and Advanced. Easy is drag and drop while Advanced provides a checkbox mechanism. The application tries to assist you by presenting a list on the left-hand side of locations and/or file types you may want to backup — for Easy Backup this list is Photos, Music and Movies, and Both. We will call these items on the left “categories”. On the right side of the application is, generally, what you have selected to backup from within the chosen category.
Easy Backup
The problem I have with Easy Backup is that it’s too complicated to be dubbed Easy. Let’s say I want to backup my Music… ALL my music. You would think I could select Music and Movies from the helper list and then click “Start Backup”.
Unfortunately, I can’t do that. I
can either drag and drop a folder or a series of files onto the right side of the application, the side that contains the files I want to backup, or I can tell it to search for Music and Movies, a process that scours my ENTIRE computer looking for files I MIGHT want to backup.
I believe that most Mac users like simplicity or they’d be running Windows or Linux. Likewise, I believe most Mac users use the preferred locations in which to store their music, movies, etc. To me, easy would be me telling the application to backup my iTunes music and it goes and does it. I don’t want to wait for it to search every drive on my computer or for me to have to open a finder window, grab my music folder, and drop it on the application.
Likewise, when I go to click “Start Backup”, I’m unsure as to what it is I’m actually backing up? If I click on the “Music and Movies” category and then tell it to go Search for these items, it populates the list. When I then click
on “Both”, the list disappears? Now, to be fair, everything that I’ve added to any of the lists is backed up, but if I have a category named “Both”, I would expect it to contain the union of the prior two categories and not be a separate list entirely.
Advanced Mode
Advanced mode is a whole other beast entirely. First, there is a huge disconnect between easy and advanced. In easy mode, everything on the right is backed up and I can remove items from the list. In Advanced Backup mode, I have to check what I want backed up and uncheck what I don’t for certain categories. In other categories, say Photos or Music and Movies, the Advanced mode behaves identical to its sibling. When I select the “Mail and Settings” category I get exactly what I’m looking for. I can tell the application to backup my entire Mail folder because it has it right there waiting for me. This, I like. But if I want to backup my Preferences with the “System Set
tings” category, the application behaves entirely contradictory to the action I just described. Whereas the “Mail and Settings” category displays a list of folders to backup — notably, Mail and Entourage Mail — selecting the “System Settings” category requires me to select a new category labeled “Preferences” where I can select ONE item: Preferences. Why?
At this point, I have become thoroughly frustrated because ALL I want to do is replace my shell script/cron-job solution with something that’s very OS X feeling. So, I go to the “Folders and Files” category and start drilling down through the file system selecting the items I want and then, at 11:00 pm that evening, satisfied that I atleast had a “new” solution if not an optimal one, I clicked the “Start Backup” button that began a backup of 2GB of data to a network drive across a 100Mb LAN using low compression.
The Day After
At 3:00pm, the next afternoon, 16 hours later
, I cancelled the backup. That is to say, I TRIED to cancel it but the application would let me repeatedly click the cancel button and progress bars kept pixeling themselves along — tracking what progress I have no idea. I finally told the application to Quit, a command it seemed all too pleased to follow.
Funny story though. Once I relaunched the application I had, in my recent backups list, a backup that I had quit and for all intents and purposes had failed — a backup I could schedule.
Summary
Honestly, for $30, the product isn’t terrible. If you want to periodically backup your iTunes music to DVD, I’m guessing this product will work for the novice user. It will allow you to break backups across multiple discs and that is a nice feature.
However, for $30 I can do that myself by dragging and dropping items into a “Burn Folder”. I want my backups to work unattended where I don’t have to babysit the process and this soft
ware just won’t do it for me.
In the end, I go back to my shell script. I’m $30 poorer and I don’t want you to share the same fate. So, to the one reader we have out there I have made my shell script available on the Meadows Design site for download. It’s free, it’s hackish, but it works and you can read a little about it and how to use it in my blog over there.