Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

There are many good backup utilities out there, and the number of choices is growing. What makes FreeRideCoding's SmartBackup 2.2.4 unique is that—in addition to most of the usual trimmings of a good backup program, including incremental and bootable backups, network backups, and the ability to retrieve files from your backups using the Finder—it lets you define files to be backed up using saved Spotlight searches. This gives you the flexibility to, for example, include or exclude files from your backups based on file type, file extension, or even Finder label.

The developer has also included presets for personal files (such as Mail, iCal, and Safari data) hidden outside of your Documents folder, as well as Automator and Terminal integration. Although scheduling isn't provided, you can use the included Automator action to schedule backups via iCal.