When most people think about Apple and backups they probably think about Time Machine or perhaps even Time Capsule. But Apple has a lesser-known application which you might consider using.

The app, simply named Backup, was originally available only to .Mac users, but is now openly available on Apple's website. It lists "MobileMe account" as one of its requirements. If you do not have a MobileMe account, each backup is limited to 100 MB. The good news is that for what I am suggesting, 100 MB will be completely sufficient for most people. Follow along as I use Backup to create a complete and scheduled backup of personal data and settings on my Mac.

First, install and launch the application. Choose Plan > New Plan from the menu.

If you have a MobileMe account, choose the "Personal Data & Settings" option (second from the top), click the "Choose Plan" button, and then skip the next paragraph.

1Password is one of my very favorite and most essential Mac utilities. Combined with Dropbox, I can have all of my login information synced to all of my Macs.

The other day I noticed that 1Password had gained a lot of weight, specifically around the backups area. I'm not usually one to comment on such things, but we weren't talking about "love handles," 1Password's backups had gone from 1MB to 21MB literally overnight. On August 28th, the backups were 1MB, and on August 29th, the backups were suddenly 21MB.

Wait? Did you say August 28th? Isn't that when Snow Leopard was released? Yes it was. And wasn't that when you switched from 1Password version 2 to 1Password version 3? Yes it was. Could that have something to do with it?

I contacted 1Password's excellent support staff who correctly diagnosed that the increase was related to the preview images which are used for Login and Software License icons. (These can be found in the 1Password.agilekeychain/a/default/thumb folder.) Each preview image take about 100K. With 600+ items in my agilekeychain, this quickly added up.

Fortunately, this is easily fixed. If disk space is a concern, the icons and previews can be deleted using 1Password > Preferences > General > Remove all icons and previews. I also unchecked the box next to "Automatically download icons and previews for new Logins." After I did that, the backup size went from 21.5MB to 889KB!

Why worry about space with today's hard drive spaces? I have 1Password set to backup to my Dropbox account, which is limited to a total of 5GB. Plus this meant having to upload 20+MB every day versus <1MB. Personally I neither use nor need the icons, so it's no loss to me, and it makes a big difference.

Many thanks to the 1Password folks for helping me get to the bottom of this mystery!

I'm pretty paranoid about making sure that backups are done on all of my Macs. That's why I carry a small Western Digital MyPassport hard drive with me wherever I go with my MacBook Air, since I do at least one Time Machine backup a day -- even when I'm on the road.

This is my second MyPassport drive. That's not saying that anything is wrong with the Western Digital drives; it's just that the first one I owned fell off of a classroom desk while a backup was in progress, pulling out the USB cable and dropping about three feet onto a hard floor. The drive appeared to be OK, but never worked again.

That's why I was happy to hear that OWC announced the Mercury On-The-Go Pro series of portable bus-powered SSD drives yesterday. Solid-state drives, since they have no moving parts, can put up with a lot more abuse than traditional platter-based drives. They also offer better read performance than regular hard drives, and are often less power-hungry.

The drives come in three different capacities -- 64 GB (US$279.99), 128 GB (US$449.99), and 256 GB (US$729.99) -- and all offer 64 MB of cache, as well as Firewire 400/800 and USB 2.0 interfaces. Being bus-powered, they don't need an AC adapter, making the On-The-Go Pro series perfect for road trips.

While SSD drives are still more expensive than traditional hard drives, they're definitely more rugged, and in the long run that might be less costly than replacing a dropped hard drive. I've had extremely good success with OWC's products in the past, making this a doubly-attractive proposition. Of course, making sure my students don't cause my drives to take a dive off of a desk is a cheaper solution!

People who are religious about backups, especially those who use removable media like CDs or DVDs as backup media, often find themselves in a world of hurt when they try to find individual files on a pile of discs. It's worse than finding the proverbial needle in a haystack!

Developer Robert Kuilman released version 4.0 of his Media Catalog application today (July 7, 2008). Media Catalog makes quick work of cataloguing all of those archive CDs, DVDs, and external hard drives.

While test-drivng Media Catalog, I popped in a few old backup CDs. The application catalogued hundreds of files in a few seconds, then popped the CDs out. You can also drag-and-drop volumes onto the application to add them to the catalog. Searching is extremely fast, and you can use Quick Look to preview documents as long as the original media is mounted.

Kuilman rewrote his indexing code and speed has improved up to 770% over version 3.9. You can try out Media Catalog 4.0 for free (limited to five media), or purchase it for $24.95.

Earlier today, by request, I posted about a way to restore your notes.db file after inadvertantly deleting it via a firmware upgrade. As several readers have pointed out, it's a lot easier to perform a full backup before the restore than trying to backtrack afterwards. Here's a quick forcing back-up how-to for the Mac.

The folks at MacZealots have posted an article that compares several Mac backup solutions, including SuperDuper! (my personal favorite), Synk Backup, Apple's Backup, iBackup and Crashplan, as well as some speculation on Time Machine.

In the end, SuperDuper! and Crashplan came out on top as the bookends of a comprehensive plan: SuperDuper! for a full backup to an external drive, and Crashplan for off-site storage of mission-critical files. This is pretty much what I do, though I hadn't heard of Crashplan until I wrote this post!

The important thing here - and we know you've all heard this a million times - is this: Back up your stuff!

I'm looking forward to Leopard's Time Machine, but Versomatic - at least based on the description - is going to truly rock my world. It's not the first app to offer this kind of versioning and archiving, but it sounds better than those that have come before.

Versomatic is a new utility from Acertant which runs as a background service, tracking changes to your files over time. It needs no additional hardware and is a great complement to your existing backup strategy. Once installed it tracks changes, and preemptively archives a copy of a file you're about to edit prior to your modifying the file. You can tell it which file types to track and which to ignore - or set it to ignore entire directories if you wish. Files are stored in their native format and you can specify how much hard drive space is available for version stores and how many revisions to keep track of. Prior revisions are accessible from a contextual menu or from the Version Manager in your menubar. The edit trail and export features can also be used to prove authorship, copyright, and as part of any complete Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPPA compliance strategy, which many Enterprise users will appreciate.

I just tried the newly available Version 1.0 for Mac and the install and initial preference setting was a breeze, despite requiring me to restart. I tested it out on a few Word docs and text files and it works as advertised so far. Of course only time will tell how well it really works and whether it affects performance in any way, but so far I like what I see.

Versomatic can be download now and has a 30-day free trial. Early Birds can purchase it for $39.99 (20% off the regular price) and volume discounts are available. It's Universal Binary, but does require Mac OS X 10.4 or newer. Take it for a spin and let us know what you think of it!