My Favorite Mac Backup Utility.

Carbon Copy Cloner (free): Good tool. Basically, it clones your hard drive to another hard drive and makes a bootable ‘carbon copy.‘ Limited feature set, though. Development seems to have stopped this past year.

Synchronize Pro ($99; expensive): This is an oldie but a goodie, albeit an expensive goodie. Think of Sync Pro as the Swiss Army Knife of file backup utilities. However, it’s bootable backup feature is not flawless and the application suffers from feature-itis. Too many things to choose to make it work.

Backup Simplicity (cheaper): From the same folks at Sync Pro. Simple. It clones your hard drive to another hard drive. It does it well, although I’ve run into a few quirks, and sometimes it “forgets” the license registration number and stops working.

DejaVu (inexpensive): This is a nice little application that’ll backup an entire volume or a number of files. It’s a System Preference so it’s always available. Sometimes it just quits working without much notice and, as a System Preference, is prone to not working when Apple upgrades Mac OS X.

Dantz Retrospect (expensive): Puh-leeze. This application has been around awhile and is like owning a Fiat automobile. You’ll need someone in the old country to help you out with repairs. This is the most finicky application ever on Mac OS X. Still, it’s loaded with features and many businesses (pay through the nose) use it to backup files over a network to other volumes.

Apple’s Backup (free with Mac OS X): This isn’t bad, considering the price. Oh, did I mention that you need a $100 per year Apple .Mac account to use all the features. Try that for three years and “Backup” isn’t FREE anymore.

Others to consider:

• ChronoSync
• Folder Synchronizer
• rSync and pSync
• YouSynchronize
• LaCie SilverKeeper
• Xupport (I use, but not for backups)

Those are the notable applications and worthy of review, and try before you buy. Go to Version Tracker and enter “backup” in the Search. You’ll get four pages of backup utilities, most not worth looking at, some are good products.

For the money, nothing is better than SuperDuper. One feature I want that isn’t available (yet) is automatic backups. That’ll come. For now, this is Super Duper.

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