Mojave Shade has announced the release of Lifeboat, a Mac OS X backup utility. It costs $30, and demo is available for download.
Lifeboat enables you to make backups of content on your Mac’s hard drive “as painless as possible,” according to the developers. You can either pick individual files and folders directly, or set up a “Smart Group” to grab sets of files. You can schedule backups to recur automatically, as well. After the backup is done, a “human-readable digest” is created to help you locate each file if necessary.
Like the Finder’s own Smart Folders, Smart Groups let you create a set of files by defining a set of rules. Those folders are then updated automatically. You can use them to select all files for a current project, for example, or pictures from a recent vacation. “Anything you can search for in Spotlight you can use to make a Smart Group,” said Mojave Shade on its Web site.
System requirements call for Mac OS X v10.4.1 or later. Lifeboat is not currently compatible with Intel-based Macs, but the developer said that the problem is being worked on.