best backup software for os x

It depends on how you want to backup. Do you want to do an incremental backup do you want to do a full backup. Do you want to backup to cds or dvds, or can you backup to another drive?

I find the cheapest and easiest form of backup is to an external drive. Get a good external enclosure and put a cheap large slow drive in it. Then use it only for backing up. You can then use a program like Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your entire drive to it and then make incremental updates. In any case if the data is really important to you remember to take the backup to an off site location. So if you have a fire or something you still have your backup and vice versa.

 

The best software i've used (besides the wonderfully exact copies created by CarbonCopyCloner) was Deja Vu, it's a control pane that lets you schedule backups of whatever you want, whenever you want. I recommend this for sheer ease of use and reliability. I know CarbonCopyCloner was starting to include an automatic feature, but the last time i tried it, it wasn't developed enough to be easy.

paul

 

I use 3 products right now, 2 of them because I can't decide which one I like better.

I got myself an external FW enclosure and placed a 120GB drive in it. I partitioned it as two drives, one similar in size to my iBook's internal drive.

I use CarbonCopyCloner every now and then to make an exact image of my iBook's HD to the 2nd partition, and I make sure it is bootable for disaster recovery.

For weekly/almost-daily backups I am using SilverKeep (free from Lacie), and Impression(s?) Backup 2.0. I just backup my home directory now, and I can't decide which one to use exclusively yet.

SilverKeep allows you to schedule backups, do incremental or full and allows you to define how many backup sets to keep. However, I think it only copies the files, i.e. it doesn't create a backup archive file.

Impression allows you to either do a regular copy backup to a disk image, or to back up to a PAX archive file which you can use better to restore files I think. I haven't seen any scheduling capabilities in it.