BounceBack Pro 7.1 , from CMS Products , is useable either bundled with their ABSplus external hard drives or singly as tolerate - alone software package . Either way , its stress is unmortgaged : making a bootable duplication of your inauguration volume onto an international severe drive , and updating it every time the drive is plugged in .
After you install BounceBack Pro and perform the obligatory restart , a set - up assistant appears on - screen to guide you through setting up a backup . If you have an outside hard drive attached and take the default options , the software creates a bootable extra onto that drive . If you do n’t have an external drive , the default option is to stack away a extra of your user Documents booklet . or else of , or in addition to , a full scheme backup , you’re able to prefer specific data file , folders , or volumes to back up ; you’re able to also manually exclude specific items from a backup . BounceBack Pro supports multiple backup set — sets of file to be backed up , with colligate destination and agenda .
After an initial full substitute , each subsequent backup is incremental , but not additive : if an older version of a filing cabinet exists on the destination bulk , it ’s overwritten . Files edit from the source , however , are not deleted from the name and address , which can result in redundant , unwanted files on your name and address volume . Under some destiny ( such as after a system update ) , those extra files could potentially moderate to serious problem , including an inability to boot from the backup drive . Although BounceBack Pro put up a manual Purge mastery to delete the extra file , it ’s unintuitive to employ . cater an option to delete the files automatically would have been a heady choice .
BounceBack Pro can use any mount intensity as the goal , but the program offers no lineal support for ocular disk . If you want to back up to CD or DVD , you must insert a blank record , choose the disk as the destination in BounceBack Pro , and be careful not to select more files than will match on it . After BounceBack Pro play , you may manually habituate the Burn Disc dictation to register the data to the magnetic disc .
Restoring a backup — in whole or in part — is straightforward . get through the Restore push , select the items you want to reestablish , and choose whether to replicate them to their original placement or a dissimilar location . Click Restore , and BounceBack Pro cursorily copies the file(s ) from the backup media .
BounceBack Pro now volunteer limited password auspices ( but not encoding ) for backup thrust . Turning on this feature article , grant to the troupe , activates a build - in word ready on endure hard drives , such that the drive ’s contents can not be read on any computer unless that calculator has BounceBack Pro installed and the correct password is entered . I was unable to utilise the feature film on either of my trial drives — a 60 GB BUSlink FireWire drive and a 500 GB Western Digital My Book Pro ( ) take with FireWire and USB 2.0 interface — because the private road did not seem in BounceBack Pro ’s inclination of devices eligible for password protection .
The BounceBack installer creates a leaflet with nine coating , of which one — BounceBack Control Center — serves as a central launcher . However , several of the applications are designed to run for only in the background , and it ’s unclear which of these applications users should open up in guild to use the software . Although the Control Center was designed to mix the functions of all the separate applications , it does n’t go far enough — and in some way draw thing worse because it puts yet another ikon in that pamphlet . Packaging all the components inside a single diligence bundle ( a plebeian practice for OS X applications ) would have made the software easier to use . Even within BounceBack Control Center , the user port is odd ; a portion of the window acts as a series of engraft duologue that take the air you through various procedures , but I frequently found this organization confusing — I could n’t easy count on out how to get from one action to another one or why some alternative were disabled at certain times .
Macworld’s buying advice
As a bundled utility to create bootable backups in combination with a CMS operose drive , BounceBack Pro 7.1 easily gets the chore done . If you require to create bootable backups on other drives , though , tools like Carbon Copy Cloner ( ) and SuperDuper 2.1 ( ) are both cheaper and more capable . If you want to put in your computer backup on optical medium , you should consider a different program , such as EMC Insignia ’s Retrospect Desktop or Intego ’s Personal Backup . Both of these , along with Prosoft Engineering ’s Data Backup , extend more - all-embracing fill-in features and mostly provide a better value for your money .
[ Joe Kissell is the senior editor in chief of TidBITS and the source ofReal World Mac Maintenance and Backups(Peachpit , 2007 ) . ]
