So certainly I have no difficulty spending the money for backup hardware and software; since that time I’ve spent way more than $150 on my backup drives, in fact more than $5,000, covering two different DAT tape drives, a Ecrix VXS tape drive (plus expensive tapes), a Granite Digital hot-swappable drive (plus 8 increasingly large hard disks for it), and most recently an Infrant ReadyNAS. And I’ve owned and used a plethora of backup software solutions, currently both Retrospect (for archival backups) and SuperDuper (for a bootable copy of my system).

But I’m crazy, zealous about doing backups, and I’m a very technical person. My friends who have experienced problems with Backup are neither of these things. My approach is far too expensive, and requires too much expertise to manage. (Retrospect in particular is notoriously hard to use, even for people who use it all the time.) And Backup, offered as a big benefit of .Mac, could easily be the perfect solution for them.

If it worked. But it doesn’t. Backup bills itself as really easy, and in many ways it is. But in the overall lifecycle, it becomes pretty challenging. And some things don’t work at all, or fail at the worst time.

My ultimate point isn’t that it’s possible find a good backup solution, if you work for it. (SuperDuper, while excellent, does require effort to learn about, acquire, and understand.) It’s that Backup, with some minor (from a user experience perspective) improvements, could be excellent, instead of failing miserably.

Fortunately we’re not too far from having Time Machine, and this complaint will probably vanish forever.

Not too long ago I did a backup onto an external 500GB hdd – cos swapping DVDs is annoying! Everything went smooth, woke up the next morning to find the confirmation message on screen, so I proceeded to wipe the drive clean.

When it came time to restore, the restore failed. On further investigation I found that a couple of the Backup files were an amazing OKB in size, lost a lot of personal stuff – music and photos and mail – which REALLY SUCKS! Luckily all my work was already moved to the external HDD, but there were some important family pics now gone forever. Funny how that’s the exact angle Apple uses to pimp their .Mac setup – and yes, this is coming from a .Mac user.

I wish to hell I could have some kind of recourse for loosing all my photos of my daughter from the day she was born till now ( 4 1/2 years worth).
Not to mention my, almost 30GB of music that was on iTunes.

Take your piece of crap application off the market and save a lot of people a LOT of grief.

other than this…. I love apple.

I use rsync for the real stuff, but haven’t had a single issue with Backup. Deja Vu puts a nice little GUI on rsync in your system preferences. That might be a good option for your friend.

Adam, my own backup routine involves a Granite Digital drive, and three disks in hot-swappable trays. Two are used on alternating weekends, and are stored off-site. The other is my daily backup, and stays home for immediate restores. All this using Retrospect.

It’s a great solution for me, but there’s no way my friend wants something that complicated. Even remembering to take one single drive home with him at night is too much. And given that his laptop lives at his restaurant, where fire and theft are both serious concerns, any backup that isn’t off-site isn’t safe.

I guess I’m happy to know otherwise.