MacBackup review

MacBackup is a utility to back up and restore your favourite images, video, music and other files locally or remotely.

Its simple interface splits backup options into Easy and Advanced choices, although the difference between them is minimal. Easy backup includes options for 'Photos' and 'Music and movies' categories, or both. When you select one, you can either drag any files into the backup box, or let the program search for relevant files. Advanced backup adds more categories, including system settings, Address Book and email. MacBackup recognised different email databases on our test Mac.

There are matching Easy and Advanced restore options. The latter is most useful as you can use it to pick individual files to restore from a backup - this even works when recovering remotely.

So why buy this instead of the free Time Machine or Backup? It's advantages include versatility: there are three types of backup, including incremental and differential, and six levels of compression that can be encrypted. You can also back up files over FTP - an option that worked well in practice, although there's no troubleshooting assistance. We also liked the fact that MacBackup offers to generate a regular scheduled backup based on any one-off backup you create.

However, MacBackup does have some drawbacks. If you choose to search for all music, for example, the program takes minutes to scan and add files from the iTunes library, something that should be instant. This is exacerbated by the fact that you can't see how large the backup will be until the scan ends. There are other quirks: when we inadvertently selected a previously created backup from the source pane when the backup device was unavailable, MacBackup forced us to either delete the backup or locate it. If you can't locate the backup, it's deleted from the source list.

And unlike cheaper backup programs, such as SuperDuper, MacBackup can't create bootable backups, so you'll have to rely on your Mac's installation disks to recover from hard disk failure.

Any backup program is worth using, but there are better alternatives.