xTwin (formerly Twin) is the most flexible online backup solution for Mac OS X, compatible with most Internet servers: FTP, FTPS, SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, MobileMe. It even supports offline backups to external drives.
Twin is a true Mac product that preserves Finder info, resource forks, ACLs, Privileges and comes with an elegant user interface and a powerful assistant. It also provides numerous high-end features like AES-256 encryption, efficient bz2 compression, powerful exclusion rules and scheduler, support for splitting large files during network transfers, network-error
Have to change my review today: 1.5 crashes. Asked the developer to send me an old version: They told me they "do not keep old versions". Well, well. This does not help if you end up with a non-functioning 1.5.1...
Probably the worst application i ever bought. Ever since first version it randomly shuts down and doesnt backup anymore. I had to keep an eye on the menu to see if it was still there.
Kept posting my issues on the developers forum but they kept deleting my posts, saying "there are currently no issues with current realease". Every single negative post, they deleted after a couple of minutes. I couldnt get any support at all. Tried getting my money back to no use.
Issues cannot be posted to the forums, only to the technical support website. Sorry but it's not true that we do not solve issues reported by customers. See other customers comments. We care about all feedback.
Frenzy, sounds a little weird. I use the software since months with no problems. Even with local encryption and incremential backups to WebDAV servers. Do you ever consider your machine being the culprit? Did you ever try the application with another computer?
And no, I do not work for app4mac. Still, I like the product - even more if it would be $30 instead of $60 :)
Great. Version 1.2.6 fixed a small bug with our service. Now you can use Twin to Backup all your data to our servers via WebDAV at http://www.cloudsafe.com/
I tried this out for the Amazon S3 backup. It just doesn't work. It fails after a few seconds. I manually retry and it works for another few seconds. I was hoping to switch from Interarchy 9 to this but it looks like I'm upgrading to Interarchy 10.
The price is now euro 99 ($130 as of today). This is much too steep in my opinion because you also have to pay for the storage space. You could get almost three years of BackBlaze with unlimited data instead, and buy something else with the money you were going to spend on the storage.
That said, this app works pretty well with one significant major limitation: It only keeps one version of the data (even the MobileMe Apple Backup program will keep 30 days or so). I don't understand why this limit is built into Twin, because it's my storage space, so I should be allowed to clutter it up with old versions.
This seems to be the only application that can back up to MobileMe using encryption and incremental uploads. It's easy to use too (unlike Super Flexible File Sync) and is pretty stable (again, unlike Super Flexible File Sync). However, it's much, much too expensive for what it does.
I'm running the latest version of Twin 1.2.1 and a lot of the old issues present in the older reviews appear to be resolved. Its quite stable and can cope with occasional loss of network connection, continuing where it left off (very useful for backups over 40 Gb). The reports are quite verbose if there are errors and it usually just requires a click of a button to redo failures.
Twin has a very good, very intuitive interface that offers AES-256 encryption on the fly. On Restoration its handy to have a listing to restore just individual files. The developers seem to be actively improving the software regularly over the last few months.
I thought this program looked very promising and I really wanted to like it. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to work on my Mac to backup on a server over the internet. Despite multiple attempts of contacting the support team via support forum and emails I wasn't able to get a single helpful response within the last 6 weeks (!). So I paid good money for this program, haven't managed to back up a single file yet and am getting more and more annoyed with them. I tried to get my money refunded - also unsuccessfully.
Bottom line: Unfortunately this is not a program on which you can rely on for backups and the service and support they offer is absolutely appalling. Nice idea but nothing for serious use!
In theory, this is a great app. In reality, not so much. With each new upgrade something breaks (all updates made me forced to delete all backups and start over from scratch). Developers does not listen to feedback and keeps deleting threads about issues, stating "theres no issues what so ever" and "no users are having problems". Clearly they do not want any relations with the people buying their software. Theres no real added features in new versions and the software works almost exactly the way it did when THEY bought it.
Its all really a shame, because this could have been SO good, its a backup app that does its job great in the background, until it breaks/hangs and youre left out in the cold. For 49€, the very least you could expect is a friendly developer.
I use Twin to back up about 40 GB of data to Amazon Web Services.
Pros:
Data persistence. Amazon won't go out of business suddenly, taking your data with it. You don't need Twin to retrieve the data. If the developer disappears or the app stops working, you can still get to your backups with third-party tools.
Data privacy. Data is encrypted with the standard AES algorithm before being transmitted. You can decrypt the archives with open-source tools.
Stability. No crashes in several months of using this app.
Flexible scheduling. You can set Twin to back up periodically and/or when the network becomes available -- useful for portables that aren't always connected.
Cons:
Inefficient use of bandwidth. Data is packaged in archives of fixed size, which is decided at setup and can't afterwards be changed. The default is 1 MB. So if you change a single byte in a small file, at least that amount of data has to be sent. If you change a single byte in a large file, the whole file has to be sent. It would be better if Twin used something like librsync to back up only the parts of files that have changed.
Mirror backups only. The backup contains the most recent version of each file you've selected. There's no option for incremental backup.
No obvious warning of failure. The interface is normally hidden. The only indication of a failed or incomplete backup is in the interface. If you don't look for it, you won't see it.
Suggestion:
Offsite backup is a last resort in case of total destruction of your primary site, including your local backups. Put all the data you need to recover your backups on a small USB flash drive (encrypted, of course) and keep it with you at all times. That would include, at a minimum, your AWS public and secret access codes, your backup encryption keys, and your Twin registration data.
Fine backup solution. Works unobtrusively and with low CPU usage.
Easy to configure for both local and remote backups. I like the exclusion system in particular; its files excluded preview is very fast, along with the rest of the program.
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xTwin (formerly Twin) is the most flexible online backup solution for Mac OS X, compatible with most Internet servers: FTP, FTPS, SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, MobileMe. It even supports offline backups to external drives.
Twin is a true Mac product that preserves Finder info, resource forks, ACLs, Privileges and comes with an elegant user interface and a powerful assistant. It also provides numerous high-end features like AES-256 encryption, efficient bz2 compression, powerful exclusion rules and scheduler, support for splitting large files during network transfers, network-error recovery, individual digital signature for backed up files, multi-cores machines optimization and much more!
Twin is the best backup solution for Mac OS X users who already have access to online storage (web hosting, work servers, MobileMe...), or who want to buy their own dedicated online storage (Amazon S3, Bingo Disk, Online Storage Solutions), or even users who simply want more control and advanced features than other backup products allow.
+71
appleHQ reviewed on 12 Oct 2011
+71
+71
-2
-2
Frenzy reviewed on 05 Dec 2010
Kept posting my issues on the developers forum but they kept deleting my posts, saying "there are currently no issues with current realease". Every single negative post, they deleted after a couple of minutes. I couldnt get any support at all. Tried getting my money back to no use.
Bad software, even worse developer. Stay away!
-3
+1
+71
And no, I do not work for app4mac. Still, I like the product - even more if it would be $30 instead of $60 :)
+2
+5
Cloudsafe reviewed on 03 Nov 2010
-1
-4
-1
-26
+5
+87
R1000m reviewed on 11 Aug 2010
That said, this app works pretty well with one significant major limitation: It only keeps one version of the data (even the MobileMe Apple Backup program will keep 30 days or so). I don't understand why this limit is built into Twin, because it's my storage space, so I should be allowed to clutter it up with old versions.
This seems to be the only application that can back up to MobileMe using encryption and incremental uploads. It's easy to use too (unlike Super Flexible File Sync) and is pretty stable (again, unlike Super Flexible File Sync). However, it's much, much too expensive for what it does.
-4
-26
-1
Manicula reviewed on 03 Jan 2010
Twin has a very good, very intuitive interface that offers AES-256 encryption on the fly. On Restoration its handy to have a listing to restore just individual files. The developers seem to be actively improving the software regularly over the last few months.
-1
-1
Lexe reviewed on 19 Dec 2009
Bottom line: Unfortunately this is not a program on which you can rely on for backups and the service and support they offer is absolutely appalling. Nice idea but nothing for serious use!
-1
-26
-2
Frenzy reviewed on 15 Dec 2009
Its all really a shame, because this could have been SO good, its a backup app that does its job great in the background, until it breaks/hangs and youre left out in the cold. For 49€, the very least you could expect is a friendly developer.
+4
+127
Borlox reviewed on 06 Oct 2009
Pros:
Data persistence. Amazon won't go out of business suddenly, taking your data with it. You don't need Twin to retrieve the data. If the developer disappears or the app stops working, you can still get to your backups with third-party tools.
Data privacy. Data is encrypted with the standard AES algorithm before being transmitted. You can decrypt the archives with open-source tools.
Stability. No crashes in several months of using this app.
Flexible scheduling. You can set Twin to back up periodically and/or when the network becomes available -- useful for portables that aren't always connected.
Cons:
Inefficient use of bandwidth. Data is packaged in archives of fixed size, which is decided at setup and can't afterwards be changed. The default is 1 MB. So if you change a single byte in a small file, at least that amount of data has to be sent. If you change a single byte in a large file, the whole file has to be sent. It would be better if Twin used something like librsync to back up only the parts of files that have changed.
Mirror backups only. The backup contains the most recent version of each file you've selected. There's no option for incremental backup.
No obvious warning of failure. The interface is normally hidden. The only indication of a failed or incomplete backup is in the interface. If you don't look for it, you won't see it.
Suggestion:
Offsite backup is a last resort in case of total destruction of your primary site, including your local backups. Put all the data you need to recover your backups on a small USB flash drive (encrypted, of course) and keep it with you at all times. That would include, at a minimum, your AWS public and secret access codes, your backup encryption keys, and your Twin registration data.
+2
+2
stephen495 reviewed on 25 Jun 2009
Easy to configure for both local and remote backups. I like the exclusion system in particular; its files excluded preview is very fast, along with the rest of the program.
+71
upp3282 rated on 16 Apr 2012
+71
appleHQ rated on 15 Oct 2011
RodolphoT rated on 18 Apr 2011