BackityMac Editor's Review

'BackityMac' is a maintaining and backup program for Mac OS X.

The backup pane allows you to pick which files should be backed up. The pane is structured into sections, like Mail/Calendar/Address Book, System, Bookmarks, iLife, and Home. Every section has subsections that you can choose to backup. Picking the 'Entire Home Folder' option grays out the other check boxes and it does a complete backup.

The program builds a DMG file as a backup image. You can use that image to restore all your files that were backed up.

The maintenance pane gives you various options such as repairing permissions, updating prebindings, reindexing Spotlight, running crop scripts, deleting Extensions.mkext and Extensions.kextcache, and deleting system cache. Unfortunately, when I tested the program I got an unknown Apple script error, so the program was stuck. I don't know what that error was, because the debug output wasn't understandable.

On the right side of the user interface, you can find two buttons: BackPoddler and BackBurner. BackPoddler allows you to import all your music from your iPod and places it in the iTunes Library. BackBurner allows you to burn discs with your backup data, although this functionality is limited. You can burn only one backup. If you want to burn more backup images, the fee for this functionality is 10.00$.

Pluses: It can backup your data, run maintenance scripts, as well as import your iPod music and place it in the iTunes Library. It can also burn backup images to optical discs.

Drawbacks / flaws: The BackBurner feature is shareware, if the maintaining scripts give an error, the entire process is compromised because the progress bar won't move any longer. I think that Maintenance or OnyX can do a better maintenance job.

In conclusion: The backup engine is a little slow, but it can do its job well. You can compare its performance with a backup competitor iBackup. The maintenance engine is not recommended. The BackPoddler functionality is simply great. The BackBurner functionality is shareware and the trial is limited to one burning. That's not enough to properly test this functionality, so before you jump and spend 10.00$ on this functionality, I say that you should try SimplyBurns, a free and Open Source burning application. You might be surprised.

version reviewed: 1.3.3