Macsimum review: What a difference .1 makes with the GetBackup app

Posted by Don Foy Apr 16, 2009 at 1:06pm

Ever had a great idea, but when you got around to implementing it, turns out it wasn’t so great? If you’ve ever actually done anything, you’ve had that happen. And with software engineers, it happens on a regular basis. And sometimes it slips out the door.

That happened to BeLight Software’s GetBackup (US$40) recently.

I’ve reviewed a lot of BeLight’s offerings in the past and always found them to be well written and highly useful. That’s why I was stunned when I received GetBackup 2.0 a few months ago. Because of the way they wrote the backup cataloging to load as the program started, GetBackup would take hours to load when the program was started.

The program was not usable, at least not for a complete backup of my now-relatively-small 120GB MacBookPro hard drive. On smaller backup jobs like my iTunes library or my Documents folder, it choked a little but still made usable backups. But on the big job, the program just didn’t work. It would use more than 100 percent of the processor, locking up the machine for hours at a time and never actually getting to copying data.

I contacted BeLight support, which promptly told me they knew about the problems and would address them in the 2.1 version.

What a difference a .1 makes. While still processor intensive, GetBackup now performs its job the way it’s supposed to. And like other BeLight software, the program is intuitive and easy to use, something that is imperative in backup software—if it’s hard to use, people won’t use it. And if they don’t backup, when (notice I didn’t say if) the hard drive fails, all their data is gone.

GetBackup offers simple, one-click configurations for common backup projects such as backing up your iTunes or iPhoto libraries, you e-mail mailbox, your document’s folder or your address book. You can also customize those presets. And you are free to backup just about any files you chose to any media you have access to, such as DVD, external hard drives or even network volumes, if you have them.

You can also synchronize drives or folders so that both drives or folders have the latest versions.

The only thing you can’t do is create a bootable backup. That idea has been suggested to the developers, so maybe it will show up in an upcoming version.

And the program is still a little slow. Version 2.1.2, released earlier this week, helped that some, but it still feels a little sluggish. However, I don’t necessarily consider that a bad thing. It would be nice if it were faster, but a fast backup that can’t be used is not better than a slow backup that actually backs up the data in a format that can be easily restored.

And a responsive support team that will fix what’s wrong with a program is worth its weight in the gold you spend to buy the program. And I’ve always found BeLight’s support to be very good.

This week’s update also squashed a few other bugs, making the program more stable. It worked much more smoothly for me.

So, should you buy GetBackup? If you’re not backup up your documents, mail, photos and music, you can’t do better than GetBackup for the money.

Macsimum Rating: 8 out of 10.

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