Product Reviews

From what we've seen of it, Apple's TimeMachine, which ships with Mac OS X Leopard, might just be that backup panacea: you don't have to worry about it until you need to restore a file. It might. However, TimeMachine does require a large amount of hidden extra storage to work, and sometimes it's better to know exactly what's backed up, and where.

Decimus Software's Synk tools provide a faster alternative to traditional backup software, but one that keeps you in control of the process. Fast backup means incremental backup - figure out which files have changed since the last backup and only copy those files. Most solutions do this by comparing the modification dates of the source and destination files, which can take time if you've made a large number of changes since the previous backup.

Decimus gets around this problem by offering ZeroScan: a helper application that's installed on your Mac and records the changes you make to your file system as you make them. When it's time for a backup, the updated file list is already known. In our tests, a 15,000-file source was checked in under 30 seconds on a 2GHz G5.

Decimus offers Synk in three versions: Synk Backup, Synk Standard and Synk Pro. Synk Backup offers a simple three-pane interface: choose to back up your home folder, all home folders, the entire system or specifically chosen items, and whether to back up manually or to an hourly schedule. It includes the option to archive changed or deleted files as well, so you can go back to previous versions of documents.

Synk Standard adds synchronisation to the mix, letting you keep

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two folders in harmony. Archiving is more intelligent, offering the option of compressing archived files, either each time it's run, or on a per-day or per-week basis. Exclusion rules enable you to narrow down the backup to just those files you need. You can group backup scripts into batches, and both scripts and batches can be assigned schedules.

Unlike Backup, Synk Standard lets you 'preview' a synchronisation, so you can see what would happen if the process was run for real - great for ironing out permissions errors. Standard also lets you run the backup/synchronisation as root, bypassing most permission problems by default. Standard's interface is very slick. It's centred around an interactive log file, so you can see exactly what happened during previous backups. You can also specify a simple set of before and after actions. These include a sleep option, so if you set the general preference to wake the Mac for a scheduled backup, you can put it to sleep afterwards.

For power users, Synk Pro pulls out all the stops. Scheduling is improved, letting you fine-tune weekly or monthly runs to the minute, by time elapsed since the last run, or as a one-off on a specific date. In a similar way to Standard's exclusion rules, you can specify rules for which files get archived. The before and after options are also improved, offering increased options - both in terms of number and type (quitting applications before execution and emailing the log somewhere, for example).

Pro's big feature is what Decimus calls n-way synchronisation. Actually, it's more like n-way backup - but by running n duplicate scripts and rotating the master source folder each time, n-way synchronisation is achievable. In any case, being able to sync to multiple destinations at once is extremely powerful, especially as you can opt to have specific destinations encrypted.

Synk Pro 5 has rather a cult following, partly due to the author's fast response time and refund policy. Despite a few remaining interface issues with the logs and rules, Synk Backup and Synk Pro are both excellent tools. For $10 difference, Synk Standard falls between two stools, so you're probably better off plumping for Pro.