Mars Needs Backups

Since backing up is the computing equivalent of a dentist visit -- sure you should do it, but it seems to slip down the priority list somehow -- we all end up looking for the WaterPik of backup to reduce the pain and aggravation. With SuperDuper!, Retrospect and others crowding the pool and Time Machine looming in the near future, here come our little green friends at Martian Technology. The LGM seem to grok the problem of triggered backups, where an external storage device may come and go; the desired behavior is for the backups to happen when the storage is there, and not when it's... well, not.

Martian Lifeboat is out now for $14.99 with free demo, allowing you to define separate LifeBoats to back up whenever your target device is ready and willing. The license is good for every Mac in your collection... no more excuses! If you try it, let us know your results.

Thanks Greg!

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Source: http://www.martian.com/LifeBoat.html

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Since backing up is the computing equivalent of a dentist visit -- sure you should do it, but it seems to slip down the priority list...

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Gee

There are already tons of apps that do this, but I gotta say this looks pretty good for the price.

I have been using BackupRight for a year very happily. It backs up to my Firewire drive and to their online storage - all encrypted. It is nice having the remote backup and the local too. Its set to run at 2:00 am every day and I have not had to think about my backups for a long time.

November 29 2006 at 11:16 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Brown

...anyone going to mention that there was already a very similar application named Lifeboat?

November 29 2006 at 9:33 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

sloppy joe

I use DÃ©jÃ Vu for my backup needs, works quite well and backs up daily/weekly/monthly/manually

November 29 2006 at 7:53 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Mike R.

#8 -- nothing wrong with rsyncbackup, I've used it myself. It's a little... spare... in the ol' UI department.

#9 -- thanks for the feedback, you may want to pass that along to the Martians directly.

#10 -- I'm tempted to get a Chronosync license myself at this point. We're going to need it shortly to consolidate a server volume full of aliases back into actual files.

#11 -- Did I make a Marathon reference? I thought I was making a Heinlein reference... but maybe I checked Marathon by accident. :-)

November 29 2006 at 7:30 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jesse French

Hot damn, thank you very much for the Marathon reference! Old school, baby!

November 29 2006 at 7:09 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Brady J. Frey

We've used Chronosync for a while on our servers, and subsequently our desktops - I second (third?) the vote for chronosync, but I'll give this guy a shot.

November 29 2006 at 6:03 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Urbanose

There's also Lifeboat, but from MojaveShade : http://www.mojaveshade.com/lifeboat

|/
c'',
-(.)-
_||_

November 29 2006 at 4:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Sam Beaven

Urgh. Awful app - no way to cancel a backup once it's started, and it compiles the folders and everything on the startup disk even after I specified an external drive. Plus, even after I quit the app it carried on copying stuff into this big fat 'tmp.dmg' file until I ran out of disk space, regardless of whether the app was running or not (background processes I know, but still annoying). I'm sticking with backuplist+ for now, might move on to Chronosync though.

November 29 2006 at 4:10 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Mike R.

Chronosync is quite powerful and justifiably well regarded. I think the Martians were aiming for simplicity.

November 29 2006 at 2:44 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

serge

haha grok... what a wicked book
everyone should read "stranger in a strange land" by Robert Heinlein

November 29 2006 at 2:28 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply