My network comprises a Mac Pro, my wife's Macbook and a Mac Mini which I use as a small server for e-mail etc. all networked through an Airport Extreme base station. I also have an external Firewire drive attached to the mini for backing up all three machines.

I have tried many of the reasonably priced backup solutions on offer and have found cause for dissatisfaction with many of them. A week or so ago I came across QRecall, downloaded and installed the latest release version and within 24 hours I had bought a license.

I had a few questions which, if the answer was not to be found in the support forums, were quickly, patiently and comprehensively answered by the developer. At James' suggestion I updated to the latest beta and the performance difference was incredible.

QRecall has to be the most versatile backup solution for the home/soho user at a bargain price.

I run automatic periodic backups on all three machines then periodically overnight when the Macbook and Mac Pro are unlikely to be in use, the Mac Mini runs merge, compact and verify actions on all three backups. The choices available on when and how to backup are phenomenal and QRecall can be fine tuned to your precise requirements.

I still use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a weekly bootable backup but everything else is now handled by QRecall.

I am one very satisfied customer.

It's a little soon to offer a complete review and rating, but so far, it's pretty terrific. I'm backing up a boot drive with 83GB and another 10 GB of miscellaneous data from a couple of external drives.

It was very intuitive to set up and configure, much more so than Retrospect, despite my long experience using that software. So far, it also appears much easier than Retrospect to modify and to retrieve items from. I haven't yet attempted to retrieve an entire bootable drive, but I'll be surprised if that isn't just as easy.

One nitpick: I'd like to see a better, more comprehensive Help file - for example, a search on "add a folder," meaning I wanted to know how to add a folder to the current backup scheme, yielded no clearly useful step by step answers. It's fine for a program to have its own terminology, but backup software, because it's usually configured when people may not be paying the most intense concentration, and restoration - when they may be panicked and not thinking clearly - all need to have clear translations in the glossary/index so that one can look them up (and the procedures associated with them) using BOTH the developer's lingo AND the likely common words inexperienced and upset users might employ from ordinary language and/or from similarly-functioning products.

Nonetheless, this is a great beginning and I'm hoping it will make backing up so easy to set up, monitor, and utilize to restore files that far more people will do so. Even the $40 price the developers anticipate once it's out of Beta is very attractive, given that it may save an enormous amount of grief whether for restoration of one critical file, or a whole drive's contents.