Independent development house, MacDaddy has released Mac Backup Guru 6.0 a new version of their popular backup app for Mac OS X. The utility offers Mac users an easy way to clone, synchronize, and backup their Mac hard drives, protecting anything from single files to entire volumes of data.
The latest version of the backup app (6.0) brings a number of improvements, including faster backups, user interface improvements, an updated copy engine, and an improved incremental backup process.
Mac Backup Guru offers 3 different ways to backup your Mac’s hard drive:
Direct Cloning
The Direct Cloning function creates an exact duplicate of a folder or disk. Direct Cloning easily makes a direct copy of anything a user tells it to copy. Users who have attempted to make a backup of their System folder by simply dragging & dropping the folder to another drive know that method simply doesn’t work. Mac Backup Guru can easily make an exact copy of anything marked for backup, whether it’s terabytes of data, or the complex folder hierarchy of the System folder.Synchronization
Synchronization is the answer if a user already has a partial backup of their data and wants to make sure that all of the folders and files that are different between the source and destination are included in the backup. Synchronization performs this by only copying the files that have changed. If it finds any files on the destination disk that are no longer on the source disk, it moves them to the trash. The result is a clone of the source directory,Incremental Snapshots
If a user were to make a complete backup of a 500GB hard drive each time, it would require a multiple terabyte capacity backup drive to hold even just a few backups. Incremental Snapshots allow users to store multiple backups of their drive by storing only fresh copies of the files that have been changed since the previous backup, and the rest are hardlinks to the previous backup. This allows multiple backups using only a fraction of the space needed for a full backup each time, while appearing as a full backup. If you browse through an incremental snapshot in the Finder it looks just like a full disk duplicate. If you were to do a “Get Info” on 10 of them they’ll tell you they’re using 10TB of space – for a 1TB drive. That’s what makes Incremental Snapshots so useful. Users can have multiple “full” backups of their drives, yet use only a fraction of the actual space on their backup drive.
Features of Mac Backup Guru Include:
- Simple, reliable utility to create copies of files
- Incremental Snapshots, which use about one tenth of the space of a standard backup and are about 10X faster
- Copy & Paste a bootable drive in the Finder (OS X 10.10 and higher)
- Easy to use, animated user interface
- Resumable Backups – Interrupt and restart backups again at any time
- Automatic Backups – Back up a hard drive by simply a plugging in a backup drive
- Synchronized Backups – Any new items are copied to the backup; any items not on the source are moved to the destination drive’s trash
We particularly like the ability to Copy & Paste and entire drive by just right-clicking the volume in the Mac OS X Finder. The feature, available in Mac OS X 10.10 and higher, allows users to copy an entire bootable volume and then paste it to another HFS+ volume, thereby creating a new bootable volume. Nice.
The Version 6.0 Update Brings:
- Speed improvements
- User interface improvements
- Improved copying engine
- Improved incremental backup process
Users can schedule a backup for any time, and continue work while the backup runs in the background. If the backup drive isn’t attached to the Mac when it’s time for a scheduled backup, there is nothing to worry about. Backup Guru will automatically run the next time it sees that drive attached.
Mac Backup Guru 6.0 is $29.00 (USD) and is available directly from the publisher’s website. A free trial download is also available.
