New subscribers to MobileMe generally know the basics: contacts, email, calendars and notes can sync across computers and devices, you get some storage, and a fancy email address to share with all of your friends. But if you’re anything like me, you opened up your iDisk for the first time, saw the Backup folder and thought, “What’s this for? There’s no way that a Time Machine backup would fit in the 20GB allotted for iDisk.”
Turns out, the Backup folder is for a program called Backup 3, which is made by Apple. What’s this for, and why would I need it if I use Time Machine?
Good question – let’s find out!
Why Backup
When Time Machine was introduced, backup freaks everywhere rejoiced. “Look, now we have an easy way to backup all of our files! Yay!” Although Time Machine is a great tool, there’s still a big issue: most Time Machine backups are kept on a USB drive stored next to the computer.
Unless you take that drive with you everywhere you go, chances are good that you’ll lose everything should tragedy strike your home or office. That would be bad.
Backup 3 is focused backup for your Mac.
Backup 3 doesn’t work like Time Machine. This is focused backup, aimed at backing up the important things on your Mac on a remote drive, which in this case, is iDisk. Once a day, you backup your info, and then once a week or month you back it up to CD or DVD for a hard copy. Simple, right?
What You Backup
Backup 3 focuses on the important things that you don’t want to lose. Choose between your Home Folder, personal data & settings, iLife data and your iTunes library. Pick between one of the four things — or all of them — and hit continue.
Backup 3 keeps it simple.
Once you’ve picked your poison, now you can get to specifics. By double clicking on the item in the list you can specify which folders and files are backed up, and where to.
By default, everything goes to your Backup folder on your iDisk, but if you’re not a MobileMe member you can choose your own location, like a Dropbox folder if you so choose.
Filter everything down from there, designating the time for the backups, how often they happen and so on. This means you could setup a backup to run every night at 3am, when it’s less likely you’ll need the processing power.
Getting Advanced
You can backup more then just the basics it turns out – you just have to dig into things a bit deeper. Backup 3 provides has a QuickPicks section that highlights all of the items you might want to backup, and even narrows it down to application type. So if you’re really paranoid about losing all of your Microsoft Excel docs, select that option to keep those spreadsheets safe.
Once you've selected your backup options, everything gets uploaded to your iDisk.
If you have a specific folder you use frequently, choose that as well by delving into the Files & Folders option. Keep in mind that if you’re backing up to your iDisk that you’re limited on the amount of data you can move per month and store overall, so don’t pick a large folder unless you’ve paid to upgrade your MobileMe storage options.
So Why Use It?
That is a good question. Time Machine makes backing up stupid easy, so much so that people that never used to backup their computers are now doing it automatically. It almost seems redundant to have to backup programs running at the same time, even if they are free.
Fine tune your Backup settings.
Turns out, there is no such thing as backing up too much. But more importantly, having an offsite location for your backups is critical. Without it, a tragedy could wipe out all of your data, and you with a heap of lost memories. Imagine losing just your iTunes library — to some, that could be devastating.
The problem is, Backup 3 isn’t super user friendly like Time Machine. The program seems geared more towards the pro user, because you have to click around a bit to figure out exactly how it works.
For example, I didn’t realize until 10 minutes into my first backup that I could select individual files or file types. If I hadn’t been hunting for it, I’m not sure I would’ve found it.
Verdict
Is Backup 3 the perfect backup program for all of your needs? No. Most likely that’s Time Machine, because it’s built into the OS and it’s very easy to use.
But if you want something more specific, a program that will backup very detailed things on your hard drive and send them to your iDisk account, this is the program for you. It’s a bit of a niche app, but for some people, that’s exactly what they’re looking for.