Say you drive your three beautiful children to school every day, and you’re trying to think of a way to get this task done more quickly. You could go for a faster car—say, a Lamborghini. That could get your kids to school in no time—except that you can no longer fit said children into the car, seeing as how it’s a Lamborghini.

The Ethernet Disk Mini can hold all your digital files and make them accessible to any computer on your network.

It’s been said that when there’s a need, the universe provides. And sure enough, just when multigigabyte digital media libraries began to proliferate on the hard drives of consumers everywhere, along come greatly expanded personal storage devices and external hard drives to keep those libraries housed and backed up.

iBackup’s list of default sources includes all the files that most home users will want to save.

iBackup’s Spartan interface may give the impression of a featherweight, but looks in this case are deceiving. Although it eschews the slew of options offered by ChronoSync, the application retains just enough power to best Apple’s Backup 3 at running regular network backups.

iBackup saves and organizes backup plans as profiles, each of which has its own set of options within the Preferences menu. For network backups, the application can automatically connect to network volumes by IP address, and can automatically disconnect when the backup is finished. Backup profiles can be scheduled to repeat daily or weekly.

Déjà Vu lists all saved backup plans in its pane inside System Preferences.

Déjà Vu stands out as the most effortless and invisible application that we tested, offering an intuitive interface that collects all of the features most essential for network backups.