Product Reviews

Backup applications tend to fall into one of two camps. Those that are easy to use, yet lack configurability, or those that are powerful, but inscrutable. Prosoft's Data Backup 3 has a foot in both: it's easy enough for beginners to use, yet can be extensively customised.

Data Backup 3's recognition that simplicity is a critical backup feature is obvious from the off, when it helpfully looks for attached devices to act as the default destination drive. If you have more than one, it defaults to that with the most free space.

In a further nod to ease of use, backup options are housed in a single, expansible panel and the implications of any backup choice are summarised in plain English.

Data Backup includes half a dozen pre-built 'quick backup' options, such as copying user or document files from a drop-down menu. You can adjust these, or create your own backup sets, by clicking the small disclosure arrow to reveal further options. You can also save customised sets to the Quick Backup menu for later use.

Previous versions of Data Backup offered a confusing menu of backup types, but Data Backup 3 limits itself to four default options. Simple Copy duplicates items selected for backup to the chosen destination drive - subsequent backups copy only changed files. Versioned Backup acts in a similar way, but stores old or deleted versions of files invisibly on the backup volume. These can only be retrieved through Data Backup's simple Restore option. Data Backup also includes Synchronise and Clone options. The latter makes a bootable copy of the source volume. In our tests, cloning the startup drive to an external FireWire disk worked perfectly, with permissions and users transferred seamlessly. When we booted up from the backup,

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even QuarkXPress and Adobe Creative Suite applications, which are notoriously picky about moving locations, launched without complaint.

Through the program's preferences, you can turn on advanced full and incremental backup types. Keeping these away from the main backup types is sensible, as most users won't appreciate the difference between versioned and incremental backups.

Another helpful usability touch is the ability to select source and destination folders and volumes by dragging their icons into a selection well in the Options panel. You can add multiple sources to the same well, which is handy if you store your music or photos in more than one location.

A big change in this version is support for burning to CDs and DVDs, with disk-spanning across multiple volumes. The handiest part of this feature is support for unattended backup. By selecting the option to let Data Backup use whatever media is in the drive, the program looks for blank or appendable discs in attached drives, writing to each in turn.

You can compress, encrypt and password-protect most backup sets, and rules can be applied to exclude or include backup items based on properties such as file name, extension or parent folder.

You can further tailor backups by running scripts or applications before or after a backup. Environment variables can be included alongside these scripts, although there simply isn't enough coverage of how to do this in the scant help file - a non-searchable duplication of the PDF manual.

Data Backup includes powerful scheduling support. Not only can you run backup sets at specified times, days of the week or intervals, but you can trigger a backup when your Mac starts up, or when a volume is mounted. Data Backup can even wake your Mac from shutdown or sleep to run a backup.

We were happy with Data Backup's performance. It didn't hog the processor even while a backup was running, and after the initial backup, backup times were speedy thanks to the fact that Data Backup uses Mac OS X 10.4 system events to track changes to a source disk, removing the need to scan the entire source. There are plenty of options when it comes to backup - we particularly like SuperDuper! (shirt-pocket.com) for cloning disks - but if you value ease of use as much as configurability, Data Backup has much to recommend it.