Backup, My Ass

First off, Apple's Backup software is a great and well-intentioned idea: provide an easy and painless way for a Mac user to regularly back up 100 MB of their data. And while a hundred megabytes, the size of a Zip disk (remember those?), doesn't seem like all that much, it's more than you think. You can fit a lot of documents, and emails, and even a good amount of photos in a hundred megabytes. So, good on ya, Apple. Way to go, Backup.

That is, if only the damn thing wasn't the buggiest piece of Apple software since OS 10.0.

See, I've got Backup set to run at 4 AM every morning, so that, in an ideal world (which I lived in for months with no idea of the precariousness of it all), the application would run, back up my files, and quit itself, while I was snuggled all warm in my bed. I would never really see it, but I would always know it was there, keeping my most precious files safe. But instead of this quiet, assured service that I'd grown used to, I've now woken up every morning for the last three weeks to the above window. If I select "Try to Recover" (at least it's honest, it DOES try), the application spins its wheels for a couple hours before failing to recover, or stalls completely. If I try to wipe the iDisk and start fresh, it starts backing up anew, but quits an hour or two later, halfway through the backup, with another error message that says the iDisk is unreachable. Okay, I can deal with the fact that it takes Backup more time to transfer a floppy disk's worth of data over my high-speed cable modem connection than it would take a 28K-modem Compuserve user to download RETURN OF THE KING from KaZaa. What's driving me nuts is this sudden inability to get it to work at all. I mean, c'mon, I do this kind of thing for a living.

My next attempt, after trashing the preferences and then reinstalling the application one more time, is going to be to start small: try using it to back up just a couple folders, then grow from there. Being the buggy freeware that it is, I've noticed that Backup often has a tough time figuring out the cumulative size of the files that its backing up, so I might be going over my limit without even knowing it and inadvertently causing these issues. And anyway, I've got no real cause to complain: Backup IS free, and as I said, it's got the best of intentions, and if I really want to protect my files, I can get off my lazy ass (figuratively, at least, since I'll still be sitting at the computer) and burn a CD, or a DVD.

That said, I'd be happy as a clam if I could get this to work.

[UPDATE]

Scaled down the amount of files I was backing up, and now it's working like a charm. Yay, Backup, yay.