Beta Online Backup for Mac OS X Introduced by app4mac

app4mac, Inc. introduces Twin 1.0 beta, their new online backup solution for Mac OS X. Twin is flexible, and compatible with most Internet servers: FTP, FTPS, SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, MobileMe. It also supports offline backups to external drives. Twin is based on the source code of Persistence application from Pierre Olivier Latour. The source code and intellectual property has been purchased in April 2009 by app4mac. Actual users of Persistence will receive a free license of Twin.

Twin is a true Mac product that preserves Finder info, resource forks, ACLs, Privileges and comes with an elegant user interface and a powerful assistant. It also provides numerous high-end features like AES-256 encryption, efficient bz2 compression, powerful exclusion rules and scheduler, support for splitting large files during network transfers, network-error recovery, individual digital signature for backed up files, multi-cores machines optimization and much more!

Twin is the best backup solution for Mac OS X users who already have access to online storage (web hosting, work servers, MobileMe, etc.), or who want to buy their own dedicated online storage (Amazon S3, Bingo Disk, Online Storage Solutions), or even users who simply want more control and advanced features than other backup products allow.

Intuitive
Twin features an intuitive user interface and also includes a powerful Backup Assistant to make it even easier to create or update backups. Twin offers a very easy-to-use restore interface: restore the entire backup at once or navigate to the file or directory you want to want to restore and you’re done. Twin provides detailed and easy-to-read reports of every backup operation, so you can know exactly what is going on.

Reliable
Twin was built from the ground up to reliably handle very large data sets (hundreds of gigabytes and dozens of thousands of files). Twin was also designed to be robust and reliable in case of network errors or even interrupted backups. All backed up files are grouped in segments of a maximum size (25 Mb typically) or split if necessary, to ensure faster network transfers, smaller backup update times and increased reliability. Twin fully preserves file metadata: creation and modification dates, Finder info (e.g. label or Spotlight comments), UNIX permissions, ACLs, extended attributes…

Powerful
Twin is compatible with most online servers: it supports WebDAV (over HTTP or HTTPS), AFP, SMB, FTP, FTPS, SFTP, Amazon S3 (over HTTP or HTTPS) or even Apple iDisk. Unnecessary data like system cache files or iPhoto Library cache are automatically excluded from backups, and Twin also provides an easy-to-use interface to exclude custom selected files or entire directories as well. If more control is needed, you can build arbitrarily complex exclusion rules e.g. all files greater than 10 Mb created before a given date. Twin supports automated backups: you can have backups run automatically every given days or every few hours. If you backup to an external drive or USB key, you can have the backup start automatically whenever you plug it to your computer.

Secure
You can optionally protect the privacy of your data with on-the-fly top-grade AES-256 encryption (approved by the US Government to protect classified information). If you choose to do so, not a single byte of your backup data leaving Twin will be readable by strangers. Most competitors backup software still use 15 years old BlowFish encryption.

Optimized
The Twin backup engine is fully optimized and can run several backup operations in parallel, as well as process and transfer multiple data files simultaneously in the same backup (this feature requires a Mac with multiple processors). However, when active, the Twin backup engine runs in low-priority mode so that it doesn’t slow down your computer while you’re using it, and you can even limit the maximum network bandwidth it uses. Twin uses efficient bzip2 compression to reduce the size of the backed up data, but is also smart enough not to waste time trying to re-compress already compressed files (JPEG images, movies, Finder archives, etc.).

Compatibility / Price / Languages
Twin 1.0 is built for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. The final version of Twin 1.0 will be available on May 14, 2009. Before this date, a beta version is only available to customers. A license of Twin is available for 29 euros only until end of June. All updates/upgrades are always free. Twin 1.0 will be available in English and French with a full documentation.