Brief Hands-On Report--Apple Backup 3.0 for .Mac Members
What's new with Backup 3.0:
• Preset backup plans for iLife content and other Mac essentials
• Automatic scheduling to CDs and DVDs
• Incremental backups
• Advanced file restoration
• The ability to back up more than one Mac to your iDisk
When Backup 3.0 is first launched, it gives one the option of importing the settings of the prior version of Backup (probably 2.0.2). We selected this option and recommend that others do also. Next we selected "Migrated Drive Plan" and hit the backup button and the backup began, following a scan of all files, marking of files and copying of files to our backup hard drive.
The biggest problem with Backup 2.0.2 under Mac OS X 10.4.x is its very slow performance. It takes several minutes to launch and, because each email is now a separate file, it takes more than 30 minutes to scan and copy the files when it used to take just 2 or 3 minutes under Panther or Jaguar. Well, that problem has been mostly ameliorated in Backup 3.0.
Backup 3.0 launches nearly immediately. For a 1.4GHz Power Mac G4 Cube with 51,000 files to back up (mostly 7GB of email and 1.3GB of PowerPoints), it took 34 minutes for the first backup but each subsequent one took only 4.5 minutes. For a dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with 158,000 files to back up, it took 23 minutes for the first backup and each subsequent backup took only 6.5 minutes. [Bill Fox]
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