Personal Backup X
OS X Compatible
Company: Intego
Price: $59.95
http://www.intego.com
I have been using Personal Backup since version 1.2.1 back in 1998 when it was under the auspices of another software company with OS 8.6, 9 and 9.1. When they transferred Personal Backup over to Intego, I looked forward to using the version that was being developed for OS X.
When I finally upgraded to OS X, it was about the same time that Intego finally released Personal Backup for OS X. So when I arranged to review Backup, I was familiar with it and its operation. When I set up Personal Backup (v10.0.2), I was impressed with the look that Intego had given it for OS X and the drag and drop capability that was now in the program.
Personal Backup X can be set to back up files manually or automatically, to removable media (CD-ROM or Zip cartridge), to partitions on a hard disk, to volumes on a network, to external hard drives (USB, Firewire, etc.) or to disk image files. It can restore backups, synchronize data between two computers (such as a desktop computer and a laptop), and clones your Mac OS X volume.
Well, since I had a second hard drive in my G4 and I had previously formatted it, I was set to use Personal Backup X. I read through the manual that comes with the software download (91 pages and covers the basics of setup, use, terms and scripts), verified the procedures and installed in on my main hard drive. No problem at all. I then set up Personal Backup and began to backup items on my hard drive to another hard drive. No problem at all, all items were quickly backed up onto the other drive. I then backed up folders and files to a CD and again, no problem at all. Drag and drop the item onto the Personal Backup interface, Source and Destination, click on Backup and it does. When I had set up all items that I wanted to copy over to the CD, I just let it burn the CD. Once completed, I checked the items backed up onto the CD against the source items and found no problems. Backup scripts are a breeze to do with Personal Backup X Script Assistant. Nine easy steps to walk through and the script is finished and ready to be used. I was not able to check out the Synchronize aspect of the program as I didn’t have a laptop or a second Mac set up to sync together.
First I checked my hard drive with Disk Utility and made sure everything was all right. I then used the drag and drop capability to set it up Personal Backup to clone my OS X hard drive over to the other hard drive. Again no problem, it was as easy as pie. I clicked on the button to clone and it began to do so. Forty-two minutes later, it was done. Relatively fast (lots of files in OS X) and I was ready to see how things had turned out.
Now the problems began. When I went into system preferences and selected Startup Disk, there it was, my cloned hard drive sitting there all ready to go. I selected the hard drive that I had cloned over to, restarted my Mac and got.. a gray screen. That’s all, a gray screen. OK, what did I do wrong? Went to my OS X install disk, started the computer back up with the CD and then ran Disk Utility. Selected Check permissions and 11 minutes later, it finally finished. At this point there was quite a list of permissions, so I clicked on Repair and waited… and waited… and waited as the repairs went on. Twenty-three minutes later it was finally finished. Hell, it didn’t take me that long the first time I ran Disk Utility to check/verify permissions or to correct the permissions on OS X.
Since I wanted to make sure, I booted up into my OS 9.2.2 partition on the second hard drive and ran Disk Warrior. Again, problems found. After Disk Warrior had corrected the Directory problems, I then ran Norton Utilities. Problems again, soon corrected. When I ran Speed Disk, it came back advising that the fragmentation was severe. I ran through that and finally I was satisfied. I then went into control panels, selected Startup Disk, selected my cloned hard drive and restarted. Finally it booted up, no more gray screen. Everything was there just as in the original. Just to make sure it wasn’t me, I wiped everything from the second hard drive and did it again. Gray screen again, not bootable.
My problem is that I shouldn’t have had to go through that just to clone over my hard disk. Most users are trusting and may not even check to verify that all is well and that the cloned disk is functional. Thankfully I also had the utilities I needed to correct the problems I encountered.
Maybe it’s just that Personal Backup is going through the growth stages, after all, it’s now dealing with OS X. But I’m going to have to pass on giving a buy recommendation on this product until Intego corrects whatever is wrong.
MacMice Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Russ Walkowich
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