.Mac has its problems these days, but Backup 3 isn’t one of them.

Early announcements of Time Machine left some of us wondering whether Backup 3, Apple’s backup utility for .Mac subscribers, would still serve any purpose. Fortunately, the application continues to hold its own by providing a range of options that the one-trick Time Machine ignores.

Backup’s greatest utility lies in its ability to easily create and manage multiple backup plans for a variety of sources and destinations. No other backup application that we tested managed multiple backup plans with the same brain-dead ease of use. Whereas Time Machine backs up everything to a single drive, Backup can be configured to upload contacts and bookmarks to .Mac, burn an iTunes library to multiple DVDs, and copy your entire Documents folder to a network drive—each on its own schedule.

Like Time Machine, Backup’s incremental backup scheme saves changes to files by date (although without the former’s seamless Finder integration and eye candy). This allows restoration of a file or folder to how it appeared on, say, April 19. You can perform restoration by browsing through the list of dated files within Backup, selecting the one you want, and clicking Restore.

Using a mounted network volume in Backup is identical to using a local drive. You simply select the network volume as your target and let Backup go to work. So long as the network volume is kept mounted, scheduled backups to network disks occur with the same reliability as those to local disks.

The one feature conspicuously missing from Backup is cloning—the ability to make an exact, bootable copy of your Mac’s startup drive. And its usefulness for backing up to network volumes would be greatly improved by the ability to automatically mount targeted volumes before starting a scheduled backup.

The bottom line. Though it lacks the advanced features offered by some utilities, Backup 3 is more configurable than Time Machine and a reliable option for making network backups for .Mac

COMPANY: Apple

CONTACT: www.mac.com

PRICE: $99.95 per year

REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.5

Reliable. Easy to create and manage multiple backup plans. Universal binary

Tied to .Mac. Network volumes must be mounted manually prior to backups being made. Backups not bootable.