Lousy customer service.

Sizerox uses an odd licensing system: when you purchase the application you get a link to download the "full" version. Subsequent updates come by way of an updater to this original. There is no license key and no way to re-download, so if you lose your original "full" version you are screwed.

So, when I accidentally deleted my (paid) copy of Sizerox, I wrote the developer and asked for a link to get my original back. Instead they wanted me to pay for an upgrade to the current version. I declined and said all I wanted was the original version that I had paid for.

And THAT'S the last I ever heard from the developer.

Look somewhere else for a developer that actually cares about their customers.

This is yet another backup-to-cloud client in the same vein as Mozy, SpiderOak, and JungleDisk. A 2GB account is free, while a whopping 150 GB can be had for $49.50/yr.

Unfortunately, the Mac client serious lags behind the Windows client. As pointed out by numerous reviewers, there is no data encryption available for Mac, leaving your files unencrypted on the servers. While the web site claims versioning, this is only available for Windows; a poor substitute "Snapshots" is available for Mac, which makes you go through the last ten backups searching for a previous version. In my experience, Snapshots were unreliable as well as tedious (think Time Machine, only very limited). If I want a previous version of a file, I want to see what versions are available, not have to dig.

Unlike SpiderOak and JungleDisk, the same storage cannot be shared between a Mac and a PC client. A web interface is available.

Support from the developer is responsive but unhelpful. "Encryption is being consider in the future and we will notify our customers when it is available".

I suspect this is quite a nice program on the PC, but it has a long way to go for us Mac users.

Keeping a home inventory is critically important. It makes a big difference when you have to fight with your insurance company, and just helps you know what all your "stuff" is. (Could you make a list of what's in your house if it burned down tomorrow?)

Enter Home Inventory. Quicken used to include a home inventory as part of Quicken for Mac (and PC for that matter); they dropped it completely for the Mac, and issued it as a stand-along product for the PC (at $30). Binary Formations' Home Inventory is a great replacement -- faster, more flexible, universal binary, and actively developed.

It's this last part that's really important. I had over one hundred items trapped in Quicken's Home Inventory. It's no longer supported. No way to export, and the program crashes under 10.4 and 10.5. You don't want to invest hours of data entry, only to be stuck with an unsupported program.

Binary Formations is REALLY responsive. Find a big? Got a question? Fast, helpful answers and fixes. There's a version 2 under development as well. Uses SQL for the underlying database, so you'll never be orphaned (plus there's an export function).

I really recommend this program. Sure there's room for improvement, but new stuff is getting added all the time. There's nothing out there that even comes close.

While it doesn't quite solve the problem of "mushy" keyboards, the audible feedback really does help one's typing. As the author suggests, set the volume at just barely audbile. Especially nice on my G4 iBook.

Damned thing is rather addictive, actually -- I really notice its absence when I use my PC at the office.