RailModeller, 3.1.4
Company: MacRailSoft
Price: $39 / 29 Euro
http://www.railmodeller.com

One of the great things about computers is that there is software to help people get the most of practically every conceivable hobby, even those not obviously connected with technology or the internet. You’ll find such software written most often by people active within a particular hobby, looking to create a tool to make some part of their hobby that bit easier or more successful. From golf to gardening, it seems that there’s a freeware or shareware program on the web for just about everyone.

On a whim, I decided to spend some of the long winter evenings building a small model railroad for the N-scale engines I’d had kicking about in the attic for a while. While looking around the various model railroading websites I came across a program called RailModeller, a Macintosh application that helps the user design model railroads and slot car racetracks.

Without such tools, designing railroads or racetracks is a fiddly business. You can either buy a bunch of track pieces and see what you can build with them, or else you rely on your drawing skills to design something accurately on a piece of paper. If your technical drafting skills aren’t that sharp, you can often end up with bits of track that don’t quite fit together.

RailModeller takes the hassle out of designing railroads and racetracks by reducing the process to what is essentially nothing more than an electronic jigsaw puzzle. You can move bits of track about, change the position of switches and junctions, and just generally play around with different ideas to see what works for you. Once you’ve come up with a design you like, you can preview that design in 3D, and then export a shopping list that includes the product numbers and prices you need to place your order online or at your local model shop.

Installation
RailModeller is available as a 7.4 MB download that includes the application and a comprehensive selection of data files called Railsets that contain the track shapes and sizes for most model railroad gauges and slot car brands.

User interface
Perhaps the best thing you can say about a user interface is that you don’t really notice it, and that certainly applies here. RailModeller is incredibly easy to use, working exactly as you’d imagine it would, assuming you’ve at least put together a model railroad or slot car racetrack at some point in your life!

You start off by creating a new document, called a Worksheet. By default this is 250 cm by 250 cm in size, but you either change via the Worksheet Properties menubar item, or else alter the default settings in the Preferences. And yes, you can switch between Metric and US units as you prefer.

The Worksheet is essentially the baseboard (or living room carpet!) and to design the layout, all you do is drag railroad or racetrack pieces onto the Worksheet. There are various keyboard shortcuts to help you orient the pieces, and when two pieces touch, there’s a clicking sound that indicates that if you “drop” the piece you’re moving, it’ll clip into place onto the one that’s already there. The result is that you can quickly create designs with all the track pieces properly interconnected, just as they would in real life.

Much use is made of buttons, palettes and contextual menus. For example choosing a piece of track and then holding down the Rotate button on the strip of buttons below the menubar brings up a selection of rotation options: 15 degrees, 30 degrees, and so on. Other buttons allow you to add polygons to the design, to mimic station platforms and other buildings, and you can also add text boxes to identify particular parts of the design.

Once you have a design you like, you can switch over to the 3D View to get some idea of what the final layout would look like. There are a few things lacking here, most obviously any way to add genuinely three-dimensional structures, such as tunnels or mountains. What you’re looking at is really just the flat track layout, twisted and turned as if viewed from an angle.
Neither can you directly add things like rolling stock or racing cars. If you want to check a siding or station platform is long enough for the trains you’ll be running, the best you can do is use the Measuring Tool on the Worksheet and then compare that length to your engines, carriages and cars.

But perhaps the biggest shortcoming in terms of three-dimensional designing is the inability of the RailModeller to plot things on more than one plane. It’s quite common for model railroads and slot car racetracks to have gradients and overpasses, but you can’t model these beyond having the track pieces drawn on top of each other, all in one plane. Needless to say, in the 3D view, you don’t get any sense of what the finished railroad or racetrack would look like.

Versatility
RailModeller has lots of track and scale options that make is a very flexible application useful to all sorts of hobbyists. A major plus for users in different parts of the world is that the palettes of track parts can be configured to display products made by different manufacturers including the principle American, European and Japanese brands.

All the major names are here: Arnold, Fleishmann, Hornby, Kato and Lionel to name just a few of the railroad manufacturers; and among the slot car brands are Aurora, Carrera, Scalextric and Tyco. If your particular brand or scale isn’t featured, additional Railsets can be downloaded or you can use the built-in editor to create your own. You aren’t limited to using a single scale or brand at one time. So if you’re an American modeler building an H0 layout, you’re free to use both Atlas and Kato track pieces and see how well (or not) they connect together.

As well as different brands, all the major scales and formats are represented as well, in the case of the model railroads these range from the tiny Z-Scale (1:220) through to the jumbo G-Scale (1:22) popular in Germany and the US for building garden railroads. Likewise, there’s a full selection of slot car scales as well.

Buying track pieces
Besides being useful for designing railroads and racetracks, RailModeller can be used to make shopping easier too. One of the tiresome parts of putting together a model railroad or slot car racetrack is that many of the pieces required look very similar and have similar names as well; if you buy the wrong bits, then your selection of track pieces won’t connect together. So it’s important to buy precisely the bits you need!

RailModeller solves this by producing a Part-list containing all the pieces of track on the Worksheet. This contains not just the names of the track pieces, but also the stock numbers used by retailers, so it’s easy to order the bits you need. You can also add the prices of the pieces, making budgeting easier as well. By filtering the Part-list through a Stock list containing pieces you already own, you can make sure you don’t buy any pieces you don’t need. The final Part-list can even be exported as a text file, so all you need to do is print this off, and away you go.

One annoyance is the separation of the Stock option under the File menu (where you edit the list of track pieces you have) from the Part-list option under the Worksheet menu (where you can see and export the list of track pieces you need). Contrary to most of the rest of the application, you probably will need to read the manual to realize that these two options are interconnected, and until you’ve edited the parts list via the Stock option, the Part-list option won’t be able to list the pieces of track you need to buy. This is really the only part of the application that is genuinely badly designed, and that’s perhaps why it stands out as being so boneheaded.

Summary
All things considered, the good things about RailModeller far outweigh most of the niggles mentioned, the sole exception being the lack of gradients and overpasses, a feature that some designers will find awkward. It should be stated though that this failing doesn’t mean you can’t design railroads or racetracks that have gradients and overpasses, all it really means is that your designs won’t look right in the 3D View mode. All the other aspects, such as easy connection of track pieces and the useful Part-list work just fine.

So, the bottom line is that RailModeller is a useful application at a low price that does its job extremely well. It’s easy to use and very versatile, and compared to the old fashioned way of designing railroads and racetracks, an absolute godsend.

Pros: Very easy to use; track options for all the major scales and brands; lots of useful features

Cons: Can’t model gradients or overpasses; 3D view somewhat limited; Stock and Part-list options depend on each other, but aren’t obviously connected in the user interface

System requirements: Mac OS X 10.3 or higher; Universal Binary

MyMac.com Rating: 4 out of 5

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Drive Genius 2.1
Company: Prosoft Engineering
Price: $99.00 ($59 Upgrade from Drive Genius 1.x)
Requirements: G4, G5 or Intel Mac; 1 GHz processor or better
http://www.prosofteng.com/

Hard drive utilities are used to maintain, repair and configure hard drives. Since OS X already comes with a basic hard drive utility called Disk Utility, you might wonder what’s the point of buying a third-party program like Drive Genius.

The short answer is that third-party disk utilities offer more power and versatility. They provide more ways to optimize disk performance than Disk Utility, fix problems that Disk Utility can’t, and are more flexible than Disk Utility in the range of options available when formatting new hard drives.
There is a flip side to a program that offers power and versatility though. The more options there are, the more danger there is of the user choosing the wrong tool or using it in the wrong way. With hard drive utilities this risk is particularly dangerous: with the press of a few mouse buttons, a careless user can lose data, potentially irreversibly!

So for a disk utility to be safe as well as useful, it needs an interface that steps the user through the tools, making it clear what each one does, and preferably warns them before doing anything stupid.

Installation
The installation process couldn’t be simpler: all you need to do is drag the application from the CD to the Applications folder. It doesn’t seem to matter whether you choose the main Applications folder or the one in your Home folder. The first time you launch Drive Genius you will then be prompted for a serial number. Once that’s successfully entered, you’re presented with the main Drive Genius window, of which more will be said shortly.
But before looking at the interface, it should be stated clearly that several tools in the Drive Genius toolbox cannot be used on the hard drive with the currently active operating system. Normally this is the disk inside your computer, and the the copy of Drive Genius installed on your computer can only be used to examine this disk, not fix it. On the other hand, you can use your installed copy of Drive Genius to repair or format any other Mac-formatted hard drives connected to your computer via USB, FireWire, ATA or SCSI.

However, unlike Disk Utility, you cannot use Drive Genius to produce FAT-32 formatted disks or partitions usable by Microsoft Windows. Whether this matters to you will depend on how much you use Boot Camp or virtualization software such as Parallels Desktop. Perhaps more surprisingly, Drive Genius doesn’t support iPods, even iPods with hard drives as opposed to flash memory inside them. You can certainly use some of the tools to examine and perhaps even optimize your iPod; the disk fragmentation tool for example works without any problems at all. But you can’t use Drive Genius to repair or format an iPod.

The main Drive Genius window is an animated Tool Arena from where you can launch whichever tool you need.

User interface
Prosoft Engineering products tend to sport distinctly non-standard interfaces, and Drive Genius is no exception. In this case, while some aspects might be mere eye candy, on the whole the interface does in fact make some kind of sense.

When the user launches the application, the main Drive Genius window contains a gently curved, three-dimensional arrangement of six tool icons followed by a green arrow. Clicking on the green arrow ‘spins’ the view, so that six additional tool icons revolve into view. A curved yellow arrow spins you back. When the mouse pointer moves over a particular icon, an animation moves that icon into the centre of the window and the name of that tool appears above it.

It’s hard to see how Drive Genius could be any more explicit about the risks involved when using certain tools!

This arrangement of tools in what Prosoft calls the Tool Arena is a bit weird, but it works. The first six tools are probably the ones the majority of users will use most often. These tools are all to do with repairing and analyzing disks. The second six tools are mostly concerned with editing, erasing and duplicating disks. These tools are likely to be used a lot less frequently than the others, so placing them out of view does help to keep the interface uncluttered. This second set of tools also includes those likely to cause the most damage if used improperly.

Once a tool is launched, the window changes to suit whichever tool is in use. A column along the left of the window lists the available hard drives, while most of the rest of the window is given over to various options, status displays, and of course the buttons used for starting or canceling operations.
While the tools are running an animation plays, but before that happens, a splash screen will appear if the chosen tool has the potential to cause data loss. This prevents the user from going further without explicitly choosing to do so.

Further reducing the risk of misuse, a few lines of text at the bottom of the Drive Genius window explain the purpose of each tool, both within the Tool Arena window and once that particular tool has been launched. If that still isn’t enough information, a link under the Help menu opens a PDF version of the user manual.

Personally, I much prefer PDF versions of user manuals to HTML files or standalone applications; PDF files are easy to read, easy to search, and easy to print. So while the lack of a printed manual is always regrettable, in this instance, it’s no big deal.

The tools
The six tools that appear in the first set of six are a disk information tool, a defragmentation tool, a disk space recovery tool, a disk repair tool, a benchmark testing tool, and a byte-by-byte scanning tool that can reveal certain types of hardware problem.

The second set of tools contains a tool for checking disk integrity, a tool for initializing disks, a tool for partitioning disks, a tool for duplicating disks, a tool for securely erasing data, and a sector editing tool.

All of the tools provided will be useful to certain people, though some will have much wider usefulness than others. At one extreme, the sector-editing tool Sector Edit is a very specialized tool that the vast majority of Mac users will have no use for at all. But several tools will be useful to almost all Mac users, and those are the ones worth looking at in more depth.

Obviously the disk repair tool, Repair, is of premier importance. Superficially at least it is similar to Disk Utility, running in a two-step process that involves a verification stage to begin with, and then the actual repair stage afterwards. It’s difficult to know what the differences are between Repair and Disk Utility, since most of the words that come up in the status windows of both applications are the same.

The disk defragmentation tool Defrag works well, but Macs and their hard drives are so fast nowadays that most users won’t find any appreciable difference in speed. It used to be that waiting for your Macintosh to find space on a fragmented hard drive was significant bottleneck in terms of speed, but this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. The process of defragmentation does take some time: expect to set aside a few hours for Defrag to perform its magic. Whether or not you’ll ever make up that time through having a much faster Mac is debatable!

DriveSlim is intended to recover disk space by removing duplicate and unnecessary files. For obvious reasons it’s wise to back up your data before using this tool, but beyond that, it seems to work well.

By default, DriveSlim flags five types of file as being possibly worth deleting: large files that haven’t been used for more than 30 days; duplicate files; unused localization files such as language files; the redundant parts of Universal Binary applications; and temporary (cache) files. You can choose whether or not to include each of these categories in your search, and at least some categories have configurable settings, such as minimum file sizes or the time since the file was last accessed.

Although not available by default, advanced users can switch on a ‘hidden’ setting in the Expert Preferences panel that makes it possible to choose a sixth type of file as well, orphaned files.

Once DriveSlim has complied its list of possibly wasteful files, it arranges them into the five (or six) categories allowing you to sort through them and choose which ones, if any, you’d like to delete.

The partitioning tool, Repartition, is another useful tool. Unlike Disk Utility, you can use Repartition to resize your hard drive without formatting it first. This is obviously very handy if you need to partition the built-in hard drive in your Macintosh and don’t want to go through the performance of formatting it, reinstalling the system software, and then reinstalling all your applications and files.

The last tool worth mentioning is Shred, a tool that securely deletes unwanted file. OS X 10.5 does of course come with a built-in Secure Delete option, but it’s a one-size-fits-all approach, and Apple are (for some reason) a bit cagey about precisely how secure Secure Delete actually is. Be that as it may, Shred provides Mac users with a quick way to delete files, folders or volumes at a variety of security levels including US Department of Defense standards.

Bugs, performance and stability
On the whole Drive Genius worked flawlessly. The only real problem was a peculiar one: on my 1.83 GHz MacBook Pro, the copy of the application on the hard drive refused to get past the initialization screen when I was logged into the administrator account. It ran just fine from the DVD as well as from any other accounts, including guest accounts. Clearly there was a conflict between the application and something in the administrator’s home folder, and while working with the Prosoft engineers, our suspicions were directed at the Safari 4 Beta. In this case, it isn’t the browser itself that causes problems, but with the Java core Safari 4 installs. After reinstalling the operating system and sticking with the currently shipping version of Safari, Drive Genius launched and worked perfectly.

Performance will vary depending on the tool and the hardware, but even in the worst case situations things weren’t too bad. In the case of a 1 GHz PowerBook G4, defragmenting a moderately fragmented 60 GB drive took a bit over two hours; while that sounds a long time, it’s actually about the going rate for what is a complex and laborious task.

One last thing: if you buy a copy of Drive Genius 2 that’s been sitting on the shelf for a while, it might not boot the latest Apple hardware. If that’s the case, contact Prosoft within 30 days of purchase and they’ll send you out a free replacement DVD. Otherwise, you can download the DVD Boot Image, though at a charge of $5.

Summary
It’s hard not to like Drive Genius. It does precisely what it should do, delivering a wide range of useful tools in a safe, simple to use environment. Couple that with a very good reputation for after-sales service, and Drive Genius looks a lot like the disk utility of choice for a great many Mac users. Highly recommended.

MyMac.com Rating: 5 out of 5

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Book Review: Take Control of Buying a Mac
by Adam C. Engst
Price: $10
98 pages
http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/

There’s never a perfect time to buy a computer. If you wait a few more months, computers will be faster and cheaper than they are today. But the corollary to that piece of wisdom is that if you wait for the perfect time, you’ll never actually get around to buying a computer at all.

In the real world, all you can do is make the best choices from the options available. Budget is a factor of course, but you also need to appreciate what it is you want from a computer. The needs of graphic designers are not the same as those of journalists, students, or folks working out of a home office. This is where Adam Engst’s book ‘Take Control of Buying a Mac’ comes in; in a bit under a hundred pages he explains how to decide which of the various Mac models will best suit your needs.

Engst will be well known to Mac users as one of the authors of the popular TidBits mailing list. But he’s also an author of electronic books sold under the ‘Take Control’ banner. One of his most recent efforts is a book on buying a new Macintosh. As someone who’d written a similar book a few years back on buying a used Mac, this was a topic that immediately caught my attention.

The process of shopping for a new book is laid out in an impeccably clear manner, starting with the question of when to buy a new Mac, through choosing which model best suits your needs, then covering the best ways to buy a new Mac, and finally the ancillary topics such as accessories and migration of old files onto your new computer.

Starting with the ‘when to buy a Macintosh’ question, Engst makes it clear that this is often more about ‘wanting’ to buy a new Mac rather than about ‘needing’ a new Mac. Now we’re in the middle of an economic downturn, that’s particularly sage advice. Some of the advice Engst offers with regard to buying new computers is that same advice I offer about shopping for used Macs as well. In particular, while upgrades to an older Mac can be good value, you need to balance their cost with the price of a whole new machine. Adding memory for example is usually a very sound investment and frequently helps to remove bottlenecks, but the financial argument for adding a new processor or accelerator is often not that strong.

But where Engst’s experience of the Mac world really comes into play is with regard to timing. Apple have a somewhat predictable approach to releasing new models and updating existing ones. In part, they time product releases to match with annual events (such as major trade shows) where they can get the most free publicity. Other times in the year tend to be rather fallow, with few, if any, major product launches. By looking over the table presented in this chapter, and then reading the relevant notes, the potential Mac purchaser can try to time his or her purchases to best effect.

Engst also explains Apple’s fairly consistent pattern of updates within each model of computers. While not a rock solid pattern in terms of years, there’s usually a set number of incremental updates with each Macintosh line. Buy a Mac early on and you get the benefit of lots of new features and more performance, but you’ll pay a premium. Buy a Mac from the last update to its series and you’ll pick up a bargain, but expect the series to be dropped in a few months, and replaced by something dramatically better in terms of features and performance. Engst gives his arguments for shopping at each stage in the production cycle of a Macintosh, leaving it to the reader to decide what’s best for them.

The section of which Mac to buy is relatively straightforward given that Apple only produce a small handful of machines. It’s essentially a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of portable versus desktop Macs, and then a close examination of what sets the ‘pro’ models apart from the ‘consumer’ models. There’s also a commentary on those oddball models, the Mac Mini and the MacBook Air. Because they don’t fit into the standard Apple pro/consumer product matrix, they’re difficult machines to pigeonhole, and Engst makes clear that while they might be the right machines for some users, they aren’t for everyone.

The chapter on how to buy a Macintosh isn’t particularly exciting. It’s likely to be most useful to those who honestly have no idea about how to buy a computer. Anyone else will likely skim through this chapter. There are a few useful nuggets of information, and in particular I agree with Engst’s warnings about buying online from individuals, such as through eBay.

To some degree the 4-page chapter on accessories could be seen as filler. But it’s harmless filler. The same can be said about the next-but-one chapter on how to dispose of your old Macintosh. By contrast, the chapter on migrating to a new computer is distinctly useful, and will be appreciated by at least a subset of potential readers. The Migration Assistant normally takes a lot of the work out of moving between computers, but some combinations of hardware can’t be connected using the necessary FireWire cable, so alternative strategies will be required. Engst outlines these here, pointing out all the important folders and files you’ll need to copy from the old machine to the new.

The ‘Take Control’ series of electronic books makes much use of hyperlinks, both to connect to web pages as well as to quickly hop between sections within the book itself. On the other hand, there are no pictures (except, oddly, of the author) so while the format is very easy to read, it’s also a bit dry.

Overall, it’s a difficult book to fault for $10. There’s little that can’t be gleaned from web pages and Mac forums elsewhere, but having all the information edited, hyperlinked and put together in neatly presented chapters makes all the difference. Probably not an essential purchase for the serious Mac-head, but a useful book for anyone a rung or two down the enthusiasm ladder, working from home or managing a small, Mac-oriented office.

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© Neale Monks

Data Backup 3.0.5
Company: Prosoft Engineering
Price: $59.00

Time Machine 1.0
Company: Apple
Price: Comes with OS X 10.5

The value of good backup software cannot be overstated. In its latest iteration, the Mac OS comes with a built-in backup program called Time Machine that creates incremental backups on external drives. It is designed to operate in the background with little interaction from the user, and should the need arise to recover lost or damaged files, the Time Machine interface is intuitive and simple to navigate.

This begs the question: why bother with third party software?

The short answer is that as good as Time Machine is, it is an inflexible tool designed to be used in just one way. Third party programs offer much more flexibility, in particular over the type of backups performed and the range of devices to which your data is written. One of the best backup programs in the Macintosh marketplace is Data Backup, a program we reviewed late last year.

So let’s put Time Machine and Data Backup head to head and figure out their differences. Once you understand where each application scores best, you’ll be better able to decide whether to fork out the $60 for Data Backup or stick with the copy of Time Machine you got with OS X Leopard.

Backup destinations
Time Machine is designed to back up files either to an external drive (via USB or Firewire) or else to a specific type of network drive produced by Apple called a Time Capsule. What Time Machine cannot do is back up your files to non-Apple branded network drives, WebDAV devices such as the iDisk, or optical devices such as CD-Rs or DVDs.

By contrast Data Backup will not only write to external drives, but also to networked drives, the iDisk, and to writable CDs and DVDs. So in terms of flexibility, Data Backup scores here much more strongly than Time Machine.

Data Backup operates through an application window offering a plethora of options

That said, in practice some of these options may be of more notional than practical value. While Data Backup copied files across to the iDisk happily enough, the iDisk itself is usually so glacially slow as to make it almost worthless for backing up anything over a few megabytes. Backing up your entire Home folder would likely take many, many hours. Moreover, after completing the backup, errors were reported by Data Backup. Opening up the Log revealed nothing even remotely explicable to me (and likely not to most other Mac users either) so without going through the backed up files on the iDisk manually, there’s no easy way to check if they’d been copied across safely. Seemingly the errors have more to do with operating system housekeeping than the content of document files themselves, with Word documents and various graphic files copying across just fine. The only files in my limited testing that consistently failed to copy properly were text clippings.

Backing up to CDs or DVDs is increasingly seen as a old school approach, in part because of the limited amount of data that can be placed on each disk. But CDs and DVDs are cheap and easy to use, and consequently remain very popular among less demanding users. Time Machine can’t use either type of disk, but Data Backup handles them quite nicely. If your backups are small, then you can write multiple sessions to one CD (for some reason DVDs can’t be used this way). If you have a lot of data to backup, then Data Backup will split your files and arrange them across multiple disks.

Backup types
Time Machine is limited to a single type of backup, known as an incremental backup. Essentially this works by first creating a copy of your Home folder and then with each update it keeps track of any changes. Outdated files aren’t deleted but retained, so that the user can go back in time through the Time Machine interface and recover old copies of files from different points in time. The Time Machine metaphor plays upon this idea, putting across to the user the idea that it isn’t files that are being backed up or recovered, but what was on the user’s Macintosh at the time a particular backup was made.
Data Backup offers four different types of backup: simple copies, clones, versioned backups, and synchronized backups. Let’s look at those in turn before passing judgement on how this compares with Time Machine’s one trick pony.

The Data Backup Restore window is minimalist but functional

Simple copies are just that, copies. First time around Data Backup copies across all your files and folders, and after that it removes deleted files and folders while updating or moving those that have changed. On the plus side, simple copy backups are very efficient in terms of speed and disk space usage. But the big negative is the lack of a "time axis". Unlike incremental backups the keep copies of files that were deleted on your computer, simple backups do not keep copies of such files. If a file wasn’t present on your computer the last time you did a backup, it won’t be in your backup either. Data Backup does offset this disadvantage by offering both data encryption and file compression, making this approach useful for doing one-off archives to CDs and DVDs, for example.

Clones copy not just the files and folders but also the hidden files that makes the hard drive in your computer a bootable drive. The prime value to this is where you need a perfect copy of your hard drive including the operating system and applications. It’s useful to have a cloned copy of your computer if you have a lot of applications and system add-ons installed. Should your computer crash and the hard drive need reformatting or replacing, copying everything back from the cloned drive will be a lot easier than installing everything from all their different disks. Mac users working in lab environments or classrooms will find this very useful because they tend to have to work with dozens of computers with (at least initially) similar hard drives containing the same operating system and applications.

Versioned backups are how Data Backup does incremental backups. While there’s no fancy interface as there is with Time Machine, the functionality is the same.

The final option available to users of Data Backup is the synchronized backup. This is not so much a backup as a way of merging the contents of two different drives. It’s a special sort of simply copy backup in the sense that there’s only one version and outdated files are removed. But instead of one set of files, the backup, being copied from the master set of files on the computer, Data Backup synchronizes both sets of files so that deleted files are removed from both and the newest version of a file is copied to both. The classic example of where synchronization is useful is where someone wants to work on one set of documents in two different places, using a portable hard drive (like an iPod or USB jump drive) to shuttle files between the computer at home and the computer at work.

So, which is best? For most users, the versioned (or incremental) backup is the best, and both Time Machine and Data Backup offer this option. The other types of backup have more specific uses and will be attractive to only a subset of Mac users, so their absence from Time Machine will quite likely go unnoticed.

Scheduling
Time Machine and Data Backup are very different in how they approach backup schedules. Time Machine essentially only has a single configuration, and whenever the external drive is plugged in, it will follow a strict timetable involving hourly backups for the first day, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups thereafter until the drive is filled.
Data Backup is much more flexible. Backups can be schedules to take place on specific days; after particular intervals of time (measured in anything from minutes to weeks); when certain things happen (e.g., after system startup or when a particular drive is plugged in); or at certain times each day or on specific days within the week. Unlike Time Machine, which stores incremental backups until your external drive is filled, Data Backup can be configured to keep only a certain number of versions, allowing the user to trim away really old stuff more easily.

Data Backup can also be run in association with Apple Scripts and Automator Actions. This is a great feature that makes it possible to automate tasks such as quitting other applications, emptying the trash, or removing application and browser cache files before the backup is started. You can also set scripts to run after the backup is finished.

Unquestionably Data Backup provides many more options than Time Machine, so again, if the Time Machine default doesn’t suit you, Data Backup will be a lot more useful.

Interface
Time Machine is fairly harmless in its backing up mode, being an invisible application that runs in the background of OS X and is configured through a pane in the System Preferences.
But once you switch to recovery mode things become crazy. Crazy in a good way, but crazy nonetheless. A single Finder window animates onto a swirling galaxy background while the rest of the Finder, including the Desktop and menu bar, slide downwards and off the screen.

Time Machine is configured via a simple Preferences pane

Once there you’re presented with sort of linear Rolodex of Finder windows through which you can flip backwards through time to locate files that as they were when a certain backup was made. Now, it has to be said that the interface uses a lot of non-standard buttons and general eye candy. But the non-standard purpose also serves a purpose by making it clear that the user is "going back in time" pulling files out from earlier backups.

How does this compare with Data Backup? In this case the application uses one of the all-grey windows that Prosoft seem to like so much. Although it won’t win any prizes for looks, its basically laid out in a simple and reasonably intuitive way. Pull-down menus give quick access to the key options, things like backup type and destination media type. Various other options can be accessed via tabbed windows and other buttons.

Restoring files in Time Machine is a funky but intuitive experience

Recovering files in Data Backup is relatively straightforward if a bit less intuitive than Time Machine. The Restore window steps you through a series of options where you choose disks and select folders and files until you’ve selected everything you want. You’re then able to choose where you want to put the recovered file, and then off you go. Some of the interface elements are a bit vague, but nothing too serious. For example when it comes to choosing folders and files to restore, the check boxes are either empty or selected, there’s no intermediate state that shows you that some of the things in a certain folder have been selected, but not all of them. (You’ll have seen these three way radio boxes if you’ve ever configured an OS X installation, where radio boxes are either empty, struck through with horizontal line if partially selected, or ticked if everything in that set of options was selected.)

Speed and stability
A while back I reviewed Data Backup 2.1 for Macworld UK, and was a bit disappointed with its speed and stability. In its latest incarnation Data Backup is dramatically better, working smoothly and rapidly. When performing the same sort of incremental backup as Time Machine to the same external hard drive, it was noticeably quicker. But that said, both applications work efficiently and reliably, so there’s really not much to choose between them in this regard.

Conclusion
So how do you choose between them? It’s really this simple: Time Machine is a great application that does precisely what it promises with minimal fuss. If your backup plan fits what Time Machine offers, then this is a no-brainer: stick with it. However, for a lot of users Time Machine will be limited and inefficient. If you want to backup only certain files, or use a wider range of media, or need to configure your backups around a specific schedule, Data Backup is an infinitely more flexible alternative.

Data Backup 3.0.5
Pros: Flexible backup options; can write to CDs/DVDs
Cons: Built-in help can’t be searched; flaky behavior with iDisk
Price: $59.00
System requirements: Mac OS X 10.2.8 or higher; Universal Binary.

Time Machine 1.0
Pros: Simple to use; neatly fits into OS X
Cons: Very little flexibility
Price: N/A
System requirements: Mac OS X 10.5

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