A free online backup solution
We’ve all heard the warnings about the need to back up our data — if your Mac dies, you lose a heckuva lot of work. Admittedly, my own efforts at backups were kinda feeble before Time Machine came along. It’s so simple, there’s really no excuse for not using it.
But if you’re really hardcore about backups, you realize that even this is not enough. What if your house burns down? That external hard drive will go up in smoke with everything else. The solution, they say, is an offsite backup.
A number of services have sprung up recently that let you do this for a monthly fee. But as it turns out, the company that hosts thriftmac throws in online file storage as an extra. I haven’t used it much, because it requires remembering to upload a bunch of files on a regular basis.
So I was intrigued when I came across a newish program called Twin. I say “newish” because it appears to be a repackaging of an older program called Persistence. It caught my fancy because it does automatic online backups for you. It’s not quite the no-brainer that Time Machine is, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
Unfortunately, the demo version of Twin kept throwing up errors and I wasn’t able to get it to work. The developers are apparently checking into this, but in the meantime I decided to search for an alternative. There are many backup programs available for the Mac, but precious few designed specifically for online backups.
Finally, in true thriftmac fashion, I came across a nifty little freeware item called Mathusalem. (That’s the French word for Methuselah, an oldster mentioned in the Bible who is said to have lived 969 years.) The program is actually a preference pane, and it works like a charm.
Open it up and create a backup. As your backup destination, you have the option of choosing a server complete with host, path, username and password. You could just run the backup right away, but better still is the ability to set up a schedule — such as when you login, when both source and destination disk become available, every set amount of hours, once a month, or on selected days of the week.
A bevy of advanced settings includes the ability to exclude certain files and directories.
Best of all, it worked perfectly on the first try.
Unfortunately, though, there is a catch. As of March 1, 2009, development of Mathusalem has ceased. And to make matters worse, the developer links to Persistence, which, as mentioned, has morphed into Twin. What an odyssey this has turned out to be.
The saving grace in all this is that Mathusalem is open source, with code freely available. If we’re lucky, another developer will pick up the baton and ensure Mathusalem remains and free and viable for years to come. In the meantime — what the hay — it does work.
Posted Sunday, May 24, 2009 in Reviews
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Jill
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Nadya
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