The one you need

Persistence was built to take advantage of all the latest Mac OS X Leopard features, and its backup engine is ahead of the competition thanks to its numerous innovative features.

You can find many backup applications on the market, but when it comes to trusting a backup software with your more important data, you want to make sure you have the right one. Read on to discover the key points regarding why Persistence is the backup software you need:

Intuitive

Persistence features an intuitive user interface and also includes a powerful Backup Assistant to make it even easier to create or update backups.

Setting up backups to FTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3... servers has never been easier!

Persistence 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.

Restore your backed up data absolutely when and where you want it.

Persistence provides detailed and easy-to-read reports of every backup operation, so you can know exactly what is going on.

No more searching in the dark as to why a certain file wasn't backed up by your backup software.

Reliable

Persistence was built from the ground up to reliably handle very large data sets (hundreds of gigabytes and dozens of thousands of files) - click on the image below for a concrete example:

You can now reliably backup your entire iPhoto library, iTunes music or all your work projects to online servers (or of course, offline to external drives).

Persistence was also designed to be robust and reliable in case of network errors or even interrupted backups:

No longer will you have to restart the entire backup operation because your WiFi connection dropped in the middle of it.

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.

If you tried other backup software in the past that get stuck repeatedly when trying to upload very large files of hundreds of Mb or more, you won't see this again with Persistence.

Persistence fully preserves file metadata: creation and modification dates, Finder info (e.g. label or Spotlight comments), UNIX permissions, ACLs, extended attributes...

Other backup software, more often than you think, might not restore the files exactly as they were originally e.g. modification dates are not correct or Finder labels are missing - this will not happen with Persistence.

Digital signatures are computed for every file being backed up so that their integrity can be verified when you restore them. Digital signatures are also computed for every generated backup data file to ensure the data at the backup destination hasn't been corrupted.

The majority of backup software cannot even guarantee the integrity of the backed up data.

The backup data generated by Persistence is fully self-contained: this means in case of a total loss of your computer or of the Persistence backup setting files, you can still "reconnect" to the backup and continue using it, or restore from it.

If you think all backup software can do this, think again…

Powerful

Persistence 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.

You can easily backup your data to other computers in your home or workplace, or pretty much to any Internet server.

Unnecessary data like system cache files or iPhoto Library cache are automatically excluded from backups, and Persistence 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.

Contrary to most backup software, it's easy for example to backup with Persistence your Final Cut Pro projects but exclude all the scratch directories.

Persistence 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.

You can even provide detailed rules of when to skip scheduled backups - for example, if your laptop is on battery power, or you're connected through a different WiFi network than your home one.

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 Persistence will be readable by strangers.

Most backup software still use 15 years old BlowFish encryption.

It's also possible to have a specific application, AppleScript or even shell script run before and after each backup.

This means you can pretty much handle any complex backup scenario.

Optimized

The Persistence 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 Persistence 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.

Finally, a backup software that really takes advantage of multi-core machines and fast network connections!

Persistence 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…).

Most other backup software aren't that advanced which means way longer backup times.