My Favorite .Mac Feature

If there’s one and only one thing I like about .Mac it’s the Backup application. Every .Mac account has access to the program and even non-.Mac users can use it (limited to 100MBs only though).

The Backup application makes doing your backups the most painless and easy procedure ever! It comes with some built-in plans which allow you to easily backup your entire home directory, just your iLife files, just your personal data and settings, just purchased music and video or you can create you own plan!

You can choose where to store your backup, obviously your .Mac account is one of them. Unfortunately I have to large of a home directory to put it on .Mac but my iPod sure worked great! You can also use external hard drives or networked volumes. You can also set it up so that it will start backing up data at a specific time. For example every night at 3am you could do a backup of your home directory. You could even do every Sunday at 4pm or whatever you want!

If the time comes where you need to restore backup or maybe you accidentally deleted a file, getting that file back is so very easy. If you use an external hard drive to store your backup files on make sure it’s connected and open up Backup. Go into the plan that you use and select the Restore tab! If you have multiple backup files it’ll show them all. You can choose to restore everything or you can pick through the files and find the exact file that you want!

People who want to try out Backup can do so by downloading the software from this VersionTracker.com page.

People who have a .Mac account can also get the software from that page but they can also find it in their iDisk in the ‘Software’ folder.