As falling prices put more and larger hard disks on the desktops of Mac users, the need to keep your data secure and manageable grows in importance. Fastback II, the second edition or Fifth Generation Systems' popular harddisk-backup program, takes a good, strong shot at covering these needs, with its power, convenience, and intelligent set of options.
WHAT IT IS In addition to having generally good speed and the ability to compress data, which requires fewer disks per backup, Fastback II saves time with its clever partial-backup features. After doing a full backup to floppies or a tape drive, you can regularly make any number of partial backups, saving only the files you've changed since the full backup.
The partial backups usually go quickly enough to do daily until another full backup is necessary. The partial backups can be either incremental or differential. Incremental backups compare the backup and modification dates of each file and back up only the files with modification dates later than their backup dates. Fastback then adds the new backup to the previous backup file and updates the backup dates on the hard disk.
A differential backup does the same thing, except it doesn't change backup dates. So there's a trade-off. Although it uses additional disks, each incremental backup provides a record of the changes you've made between full backups. Differential backups don’t require an increasing number of disks but, instead, keep a back up of only the latest version of your files. The manual also describes a hybrid-backup strategy consisting of differential backups on two alternating sets of disks. This approach avoids the ever-growing-number-of-disks syndrome yet gives you two backups’ worth of records.
Conveniently, for both backup and restore, you can select specific files and folders by name, creation or modification date (or range of dates), application name, file type, or creator. For more flexibility, Fastback scans your hard disk and displays a list of the disk’s folders before backing up or restoring files, so you can select the specific files or folders you want to include in the operation. This lets you avoid backing up files that never — or rarely — change, such as programs or permanent data files, and easily restore a file you've accidentally blown away.
HOW IT WORKS Restoring a 45K file I'd deleted took less than two minutes and went without a hitch. The only problems I encountered were some confusing dialog boxes. While looking for the file to restore, Fastback kept asking me if I wanted to restore all the successive folders holding the file. Because I didn't want to restore all the files in those folders, I answered “No,” which caused Fastback to restore nothing. Answering “Yes” led the program to the appropriate file, without restoring the others. This situation and some other similar ones could be alleviated by better tutorials. Still, the program functions sensibly and stably enough that simply doing what seemed right in any unclear situation always worked.
Fastback offers data-compression backup options to let you save space (use maximum compression), save time (moderate compression), or do neither (no compression). The performance of these options depends on hard-disk read time, determined by disk design, the fragmentation of the disk being backed up, and the compressibility of the data, (Text and databases will compress a lot, whereas digitized sound and spreadsheets don't compress much at all.) Backing up 20.5 megabytes of data from a 30-megabyte hard disk required 30 disks and 26.5 minutes when I used the Save Time option. I found that turning compression off actually accomplished the job faster — in 23.5 minutes.
Other Fastback II features let you print labels from the menu bar, create setup files that boot the program with various setting configurations, detect bad media, create macros for executing customized procedures, and schedule automatic tape backups.
Fastback II is good, but it has quirks. Dialog boxes don't always follow Mac conventions — some don't include OK buttons but register your choices when you click on the close box, for instance — and the manual could use more detailed tutorials. The program is designed well enough that doing things intuitively usually gets you safely through even your first session.
Fastback II's speed and intelligently implemented flexibility compensate for its few minor shortcomings, making backing up data fast and relatively painless.
