My MacBook Pro just had a system issue which affected Finder window display and IPhoto albums. No amount of tinkering would fix the issues, so I decided that an OS reinstall was in order. After erasing the volume, re-installing 10.6.5 and my files via Migration Assistant, the problem was still there. Aak!.

I finally used iBackup to back up just my core Apple apps: Safari, iCal, Address Book, Mail, and Keychains. These I really wanted to be right, as losing or manually replacing them would be a complete pain. Erased the HD, reinstalled the OS, but did not take up the installer's offer to import my user settings. Basically, the computer was back to factory-new state. Gulped, ran iBackup 'restore', and bingo! All my mail and mailboxes, Safari bookmarks and history, Address Book contacts, and iCal calendars were just the way I had left them before wiping the HD. Very cool. Oh, and the problems that had prompted me to do the clean install were finally gone; everything works properly.

Five stars and a donation to the developer from me!

You are correct, Tideshark. Apparently iBackup or Mac OS X has made progress with this problem in recent versions, although the discussion of the 'Volumes' problem remains at FAQ#7. Works for me now.

This has been a very reliable backup program for me, although occasionally I will get applescript errors that force me to restart the program. Also, it doesn't seem to work on my Power PC G3 ibook, even though I am running Tiger. For everything else though, it's worked great. For a "non-clone" backup, i.e. not a backup of your whole hard drive, it's hard to beat. I find the addition of application and system preferences and the ability to fine-tune which folders get backed up to be very useful, and restoring files is very easy. Even though I have three other purchased backup programs, I often come back to this one because of its reliability and ease of use.

The Backup of the Beast?

Love the version number. Pity it's not Halloween. :o

for a PPC machine running 10.3.9, i had hoped to rely on iBackup 7.3.1 to perform a weekly backup. (i do use the old machine regularly, and keep information on it i would like regularly backed up.)

iBackup does write the backup to the proper place (a drive on an external machine, and the machine being backed up is connected to the external machine via cat5 cable, so no airport issues with speed or connectivity).

it is incredibly sloowwwwwwww.

the weekly backup started friday at 7:30am, and 26.5 hours later, it is 961MB through a 2.6GB backup.

i can see progress in the log drawer occasionally (chgrp commands from what i can tell at the moment), so i know it's not completely hung.

it is in the Applications folder, and once i can get the whole folder backed up, i can take that out of the list of things to back up.

why would the chgrp commands be so slow? why are they necessary? is there something else that could be causing the slowness?

any thoughts?

It was nice to see 4.1.1 come out so quickly after problems with 4.1 were reported. But now I am having trouble with this release as well. (1) Backing takes an extremely long time. (2) It completely ties up the computer, making it almost impossible even to force quit iBackup itself. (3) It doesn't manage memory well. Namely, although the preferences are set to replace the old backed up material with new, it doesn't find enough memory to do so. Which just does not work out mathematically, in my case. It'll have to be back to 4.0.8 yet again for me.

iBook G3/OSX 10.3.9