Ibackup

iBackup is a backup and restore software utility from Grapefruit which instead of backing up users’ files like most utilities do, it takes care of backing up settings. It’s not that uncommon to see a system that crashes because of some misconfiguration or a conflict with new software, in such cases, the user has to reinstall the operating system and every single application, regardless of having a backup of user files, however manually restoring all the settings for every single application, utility and even the operating system’s settings can be a time consuming task. That’s exactly where iBackup becomes handy.

Ibackup works by extracting and backing up the system settings, including the system included programs like Mail, Safari, Printers, iWork, Fonts and all others, as well as a lot of third party products like Photoshop, Opera, Google Earth and Firefox (the list includes over 250 applications) and saves them as a profile. You can create as many profiles as you want, each profile can belong to a different user or be a “different time version” of your own system, so that you can later restore them with just a few clicks.

Ibackup is also very useful when it comes to non-experienced users that love to mess around with the settings, they can keep a copy of the last working profile (settings set) and use it to restore network access, printers, time zone configuration and more if something goes wrong.

In order to backup settings from other applications, iBackup works on a plug-in model where each plugin is coded using the XML standard, which means that there are virtually no limits to the applications that it can extract settings from, as the community can write new plugins or even you can create your own (with some basic XML knowledge).

The backups created by iBackup can be compressed and can be saved to a local path, a device attached to your workstation such as an external harddrive or Apple’s Time Capsule or to a remote server using AFP or SMB.

Ibackup is released free of charge for home users (although donations to the author are deeply appreciated) and is freely downloadable from Apple’s website as well as Grapefruit’s. Business users should pay a fee that goes from $25.00 per license all the way down to $10.00 per license when buying in bulk.

In order to run iBackup all you need is Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later.