Shirt Pocket released an update to its Mac backup software package SuperDuper! today, and though it's only a minor version number revision, it's a major speed improvement. The software company announced on their blog that, while they understated the speed increase on the official announcement (there they only claimed a 2x increase), during their in-house testing they were seeing speed increases of about 3x over how long it was previously taking to do an incremental update of a backup set.

If you're a Mac user and you're not aware of SuperDuper!, you should be. It's a backup program that creates a complete drive image of your Mac's drive, then on a schedule can keep the image up to date using incremental backups. This means that once I had created the image, I could keep my Mac's backup up to date by letting SuperDuper! update my drive image overnight. Typically this takes about an hour on my machine, and if Shirt Pocket's blog is to be believed, that number will drop down to about 20 minutes.

What's cool about this way of doing a backup is that if you are backing up to an external Firewire drive, you can actually use Target Mode when booting your Mac and boot from the external drive in the event that your primary drive fails. This means that you are only out of commission momentarily, and if you are doing daily backups, you have only lost a maximum of one day's work.

If there's one Mac app that I wish I had a Windows equivalent for, it's SuperDuper!. Aside from the goofy name with the awkward exclamation point in it, SuperDuper! is by far the best workstation backup application I've ever used, and now it comes with 66% more oomph!

SuperDuper 2.6.2 is a free upgrade for existing users. A feature-limited free version is available that can make bootable clones, but can't do incremental updates. To do that, you'll need the full version, which costs $27.95US.

There are cases where re-branding something might make sense, but this isn't one of them.

McAfee has announced that they are adding an online backup service to their stable of products. There's no limit on your storage space and it runs $59.99US per year. That's not a bad deal at $5 a month -- right?

Well, no, it's not. But you could go and get the exact same service without the red McAfee M from Mozy - who are handling all the heavy lifting for McAfee Online Backup anyway.

Apart from the fact that you get service from the guys actually storing your data, Mozy also allows you to pay monthly, yearly, or biannually. Book a year and you get one month free. Step up to two years at a time, and you get three months of free service. McAfee doesn't offer any such discounts.

Even if you're a McAfee fan you should skip the middleman and use Mozy. Of course, it's highly likely that McAfee doesn't plan on standalone purchases of Online Backup from their web store. They'll no doubt get a pile of signups from users who receive their security apps preinstalled on retail laptops and desktops.

Dropbox, the über-slick cloud storage and backup app, now has an iPhone version. You can use the iPhone app to get to your Dropbox on the go, sync media files from your phone to your Dropbox, and share links. You'll need a free Dropbox account - which comes with 2 gigs of storage space - to use the iPhone app, but you can sign up directly from your iPhone.

The iPhone app works with Dropbox's photo gallery feature, so it's easy to upload and view photos on the go. You can also download any of your stored files that you can view on an iPhone, which strikes me as pretty darn brilliant: now, instead of just using Dropbox to back up your computer, you can use it to back up all the media on your phone, too.

If you're away from a computer and your iPhone's music and photos get wiped, they'll still be safely waiting for you in your Dropbox.

Update: Although you can obviously store music (and anything else) on your Dropbox account, there's not actually a way to sync music to your iPhone via Dropbox. Oops. Photos and videos definitely work, though.

Many of us change our phones regularly.

The phone world moves on quickly and with carrier subsidies, upgrading to a new device is often cheap or even free, particularly in Europe. While physically transferring your phone number to the new device is usually as simple as swapping in a new SIM card or getting the device activated by the carrier, migrating data can sometimes be a real chore - particularly if you're switching to a different type of phone.

With the arrival of Android in the Smartphone space and it's continuing growth, this is a pain point that is being felt by many users who are switching to Google's new baby from other Operating Systems such as Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Nokia's Symbian OS or RIM's Blackberry OS. Thankfully, there is a solution if you are in one of these camps!

Sprite Software, makers of 'Sprite Backup' have just released a Beta version of their 'Sprite Migrate' tool into the Android Market as a free download. Sprite have a very good reputation in the mobile space, and rightly so. Their products are relied on by millions of users worldwide, shipped by carriers on a number of devices and Sprite certainly have a glowing pedigree!

Sprite Software was founded in 2001 by two former employees of Binary Research, developers of the well known Ghost software that was sold to Symantec in 1998. Any computer technician that has been in the business a few years will tell you how vital Ghost was to their toolkit, and how infallible it was!

How well does it work? For me and my test device, it did exactly what it said it would... everything made it across intact!

Here's an idea I wish I had thought of first: instead of backing up files from your PC to the "cloud" of some online storage service, create a way to back up data from cloud to another. Gladinet's already doing it (for Google Docs users, anyway). With the latest version of Gladinet, you can back up your Google Docs data to Amazon S3, Windows Live SkyDrive, Box.net and more. The backup process can also be automated, so it'll take place behind the scenes, with no work required on the user's part.

Sure, backing up Google Docs might not be such a big deal, but the principle is solid. Arguably, the toughest thing about selling new users on the cloud is convincing them that their data will be safe when it's not stored on a device they can see. The extra security of being able to back up crucial data to multiple systems, in case one provider has an outage, makes the cloud look a heck of a lot more reassuring to the unconverted. For now, though, it's just a good way to back up your documents.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Love your GMail account but want to do more with it? If you're a Windows user, there are plenty of great (and free) apps that take advantage of your massive inbox in the cloud!

GBridge sets up a Hamachi-like VPN and offers loads of cool features for your Windows desktop, including file sharing, backup and synchronization, and remote control via VNC. Since the developers added support for Google Apps domains, this has become a great way to keep your office team connected.

GMail Drive is an oldie but a goodie. I've got several of gigs available, and there's no chance I'm going to fill that up with actual email anytime soon. Plug GMail Drive into Windows, and you can drop files into your extra space just like any other folder on your system.

g2peer allows simple file sharing with your friends via your GMail account. Don't need the other features from GBridge? g2peer is a good option. Your pals at the other end don't even need to install the app to get files from you since it supports "command line" interaction via GMail - check the help page to see how it works.

The Pirate Bay is probably one of the best known BitTorrent trackers on the internet. And in a few days, ownership of the site is set to change hands. If you're the paranoid type, you might be worried that things will change, and you won't be able to access some of the 873,671 torrents listed on the site anymore. Fortunately, one user has posted a backup of all the data stored on the site as a single torrent which is available for download... from the Pirate Bay.

Of course, it might take you a few days to download the whole thing. The backup weighs in at 21.3GB. And that's just for the tracking information. The actual files you download from your BitTorrent client of choice aren't actually hosted on The Pirate Bay, of course.

[via TorrentFreak]

What's better than a free trial? Why, when something's free forever, of course!

While I agree with that statement on the Nero 9 Free Edition download page, I'm not going to recommend any of you rush over to download it. Why not? I've got eight reasons.

1. They're asking for your email before giving out the download link.
Not a huge deal, I know, but it's still annoying. I'd recommend using something other than your primary email address on the download page or something like OtherInbox. In addition to the setup file, "you will also begin receiving Nero News with the latest tips, special offers and technology info from Nero."

2. The installer bundles the Ask.com toolbar
Again, not a massive problem - you can always opt out by unchecking the boxes during setup. Regardless, bundled toolbars are always an irritation during installation.

3. Upon completion, the installer asks you to send anonymous data
It's opt-in, but it's the third piece of the "why do they give it away for nothing" puzzle. A new address for their mailing list, possible referral bucks from Ask, and maybe some anonymous usage info from you.

There are plenty of Windows applications that let you backup your browser settings, whether you're using Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, or other browsers. Or you can just use FavBackup, which is a single tool that will let you backup or restore your settings for five different web browsers for Windows.

FavBackup can handle your browser history, bookmarks, cookies, preferences, and other data. And it's both a free and portable application, which means you can run the executable utility from a USB flash drive without installing FavBackup to your computer.

[via The How-To Geek]

It's a good idea to back up your website's databases periodically, in case of unforeseen server catastrophes, but it can be hard to remember to do it manually. One automated backup process you might consider is Backup2Mail, which sends backups of your MySQL databases to an email address on a schedule you specify using cron jobs. As long as you can run PHP apps, you're set to go.

A lot of free email accounts - I'm thinking of Gmail, here, specifically - offer enough storage space to keep from filling up too quickly with backups. If you're a privacy-conscious person, you could have Backup2Mail back up to an account on your own server. If you were really ambitious, you could probably set up a simple script or filter for the email account to have it clear out the oldest backups to make room for me.

Carbonite isn't a web based storage service per se. It doesn't let you watch uploaded videos or look at pictures like other services such as Box.net. But as an online backup service, Carbonite can store a lot of your data online in case your hard drive crashes or you lose your computer and you need to restore your files.

Recently Carbonite decided to make it easier for users to access their stored files from any computer through a web interface. All you have to do is login using your Carbonite ID and you can browse through all the files that have been backed up. You can't open pictures or movies online, but you can download any files stored on Carbonite's servers to your computer using a web browser.

[via Lifehacker]