I’m a big fan of Time Machine, Apple’s back-up software that comes bundled with Leopard. It’s already saved my bacon twice - not to mention hours of painstaking work - so I value it pretty highly. On a desktop system, Time Machine’s a no brainer. I have a couple of drives available, and back-ups occur on an hourly basis.

However, on my Macbook Pro, backing up hasn’t been as easy. I rarely get a chance to connect the MBP up to a hard drive, making Time Machine practically worthless as an option. Up until recently, my back-ups on that machine have been on a “when I feel like it” basis, which is to say ‘not very often’.

Then I remembered that I had purchased a copy of Econ Technology’s Chronosync software some time last year.

With Chronosync, I can not only back-up folders, but also set a specific time to synchronize the source data with the destination data. So here’s what I’ve come up with:

With Chronosync on the Macbook Pro, I’ve set a back-up and sync schedule to run every evening at 9PM. At that designated time, the source data I’ve chosen to back-up from the MBP gets copied over to the destination area, on my desktop G5 machine. After the first synch, Chronosync incrementally backs up the data, meaning that if any files on the source have been created or changed, only those files are copied over to the destination. Chronosync synchs to files over the network, and automatically mounts the network drive when it’s scheduled to run.

The G5, in turn, has Time Machine running, with the contents of the entire G5 drive receiving full back-up treatment. So, in effect, the data I’m synching from the MBP is getting backed-up twice. Pretty sweet!

Chronosync runs $30, with free upgrades for the lifetime of the product. Econ Technologies has been around since 1991, so they’ll be around for the long haul. So, if you’re looking for a convenient method of backing up your Mac laptop’s data, and you have a desktop Mac around, consider using Chronosync for your data-backups.

-Krishna

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 9:59 am and is filed under News, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.