Mac Backup Guru: A backup utility that's worth looking into

A Mac backup utility worth looking into if you want more control over snapshot archives.

- BY CHRIS BARYLICK

They may not always have the marketing budget to continuously flash their products on your Facebook or YouTube feeds, but there's a lot to be said for the one-person indie developers cranking out Mac utilities. Case in point: Benedict Slaney, whose one-person MacDaddy outfit is currently responsible for nine separate Mac utilities on the market, including Mac Backup Guru (fave. co/4jSvGUr), which over the years has drawn a considerable following as a nifty alternative to Apple’s free Time Machine (fave.co/3ERVMrA) utility as well as the popular Carbon Copy Cloner (fave. co/3YuRiig) and SuperDuper (fave. co/3LT5xpm).

Mac Backup Guru requires Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) or later to install and run. It retails for $9/£7.51 (fave.co/3EOGzaL) as of this writing, though it’s listed as $29/£24.15, and it is available as a fully functional 30-day demo.

Mac Backup Guru offers what you'd expect from a backup utility in terms of core backup and archival functionalities and works to take it a step further, even if its execution could use work at times. The core functionality, which is assisted by a nice animated user interface, offers both a synchronized clone backup, which can create standard copies of folders and drives as well as incremental backups, which track changes and back up the changes, similar to what Apple does with its Time Machine archives.