When you create a new backup, SmartBackup asks you to choose a backup style.

• Backup - This is the style you would want to use for most backups. It rebuilds the original path of each item inside the destination folder and therefore supports automatic restore where it can find out which files are missing on the source automatically. Be aware that SmartBackup will preserve this structure inside the destination folder and if you modify or add items inside the destination folder manually they might be removed during the next sync.


• Folder Sync - Is similar to backup but backups all items as top level items inside the destination folder and does not support automatic restore. In this mode other top level items in your destination folder will not be removed during the sync even if they do not belong to the backup. SmartBackup only adds and removes subpaths of your backup items. This mode is most useful to sync folders or to transfer large amounts of files from a source to a destination.

After you have chosen a style, select your destination folder or volume. You select your destination first, because it will contain everything, your backup and its configuration. Should you ever loose the content of your whole Mac, simply download SmartBackup again, create a new backup and choose "Existing backup". Your settings will be reloaded from the backup and you are ready to restore.

Note that unless you create a folder sync style backup, you must not use the destination folder or volume for anything else than SmartBackup.

After you have created your first backup, you can also create several additional backups and conveniently switch between them using the "Backup to:" popup button.

After selecting the destination folder you can now choose what to backup. Simply add files and folders via drag&drop or using the + button.

The cogwheel button contains a couple of useful presets for items that usually require backup like the Desktop, your Mail.app files etc, and it also shows you all the Spotlight Saved Searches that you have created in Finder, which you can add to your backup like a normal folder. They will behave just as normal folders do and everything that matches a Saved Search will be backed up.

Note that each backup item has a "Mode" column which by default is set to "backup". You can use this popup menu to disable backup items or define excludes. Here is what the modes mean:

• Backup - Means the obvious. This item will be backed up.


• Exclude this - That this item will be excluded from the backup.


• Exclude any - This item and all items with the same name will be excluded from the backup. Setting this mode on a Saved Search will exclude all items found by this Saved Search from the backup.


• Disabled - Disabled items will be ignored during backup, but an existing backup of this item will be left untouched. You can use this to skip items that are temporarily unavailable.

Note that excludes apply to all backup items, where they are in the list is irrelevant.

Invisible files and directories (like for instance the users library folder in Lion, or other invisible files that you might want to backup or exclude) can be selected using the open panel. Click the + button to show the open panel. Now press: Command-Shift-Period. The open panel will now show invisible files too for you to select and use in your backup configuration.

When you doubleclick one of the backup items in the interface, SmartBackup will take you to this item in Finder. Hovering the mouse over a source item will show you the full path as a tooltip.

While configuring your backup sources, you can click the "Options" button to access additional options for your backup.


In the "Archiving Options" section you can set up if, how, and how long you want to keep deleted or changed files.
When an item is archived, it is moved to a top level folder inside your destination folder called "removed" or "changed" and underneath there kept tidily in time-stamped folders. You can easily find things there even by just browsing them, but the best way to look at the versions of files you have kept, is by clicking the magnifying glass button next to the sync button.
With deleted files you also have the option to just leave them where they were originally inside your backup when they disappear on the source.

The "Backup Options" let you tune the behaviour of your backup further. Enabling ignoring changes to file flags (think "label colour") makes the analysing phase much faster. Note that things like the label colour will still be preserved, only changes will not trigger another backup.
If you want to investigate what exactly is going on during a backup, simply enable extended logging. Note that this has a significant impact to backup performance, so do not forget to switch it off again. The log is available via the Window menu and is located right inside your backup folder.

Depending on your requirements, you have several options to restore from your backup. If you want to restore all of it, or you do not know what you have just lost, use "Start automatic restore" from the "Restore" Menu. SmartBackup will check for you what is missing and offer you to restore those items with one click.



If you are looking for a particular file, use the magnifying glass button next to the "Sync" button to search for a file inside your backup and archive folders. SmartBackup will show you all the versions it has kept for this particular file and you can restore whichever you need with one click.

To perform a full restore of a bootable clone of your system, it is best to first boot from the clone and then use SmartBackup to clone it back to your original boot volume. Note that this is only required if you want to do a full restore. If you just want to restore individual data, you can use automatic restore.

SmartBackup can be automated and integrated in several ways.

• Autopilot - In SmartBackup application preferences you can switch SmartBackup to autopilot, which means that when it launches, it will automatically execute the selected backup and quit. Depending on when you want to run your backup you can launch the application for instance by adding an iCal event to a backup calendar. Simply configure an alarm for your event that uses "open file" to launch SmartBackup.app and your backup will be made.


• Automator - SmartBackup includes an automator action so you can make your backup part of an automator workflow. This is useful if you want to carry out other tasks before or after the backup, or you maybe want to run several different backups. The automator action launches SmartBackup without the user interface and runs in the background. Optionally it can show an alert when something goes wrong. Automator workflows can be saved as applications which then again can be scheduled with whatever you feel easiest.


• LaunchDaemon - SmartBackup backups can be executed via the commandline and can be directly automated using a simple LaunchDaemon plist file. Download this example file, change the backup path to your destination folder and update the time to when you want to run your daily backup. Place the file in your home folders Library/LaunchAgents folder. Now log out and log back in. It is that simple. LaunchDaemon backups will run invisibly in the background. You can easily check when a backup was last executed by just opening SmartBackup and checking the last-backup dates, or by investigating the log file.
  Note that to automate backups that require SuperUser permissions (like for instance a bootable clone of your system), you need to put the plist file into /Library/LaunchDaemons instead.

Note that for security reasons backups that require SuperUser permissions (like for instance bootable clones of your system) can only be automated using LaunchDaemons. You cannot use Automator or iCal to automate SuperUser backups.

To create a bootable clone of your OS X installation, launch SmartBackup in SuperUser mode. You can either use the menu item in the SmartBackup menu (not available in the Mac App Store version) or the free SuperUser launcher. Select your destination volume as a new backup destination and add your Startvolume as a source. Now click sync.

SmartBackup can not only create a fresh clone of your Startvolume, but also update an existing clone - which is of course much faster. Think of your clone simply as a SmartBackup backup. It supports all the features including automatic restore and archiving.

If you want to integrate SmartBackup in your scripts or call it from the terminal or ssh session, you can execute configured SmartBackup backups via the commandline mode. Simply call SmartBackups application binary with the path to your configured backup as a parameter.


In commandline mode, SmartBackup does not launch the user interface and also works when no user is logged in. As you would expect, the exit status reflects if the backup went well.

Backup error messages are not SmartBackup bugs. SmartBackup does not cause those errors, it reports them. They usually mean that something is wrong with your setup that needs further investigation.

SmartBackup tries to give you as much information about where exactly something went wrong as possible. If SmartBackup for instance tells you that it could not remove or move a file inside your backup, permission issues are the most likely reason.

Error messages that say "copy failed" are rare and mean that there are fundamental issues. They can be caused by a damaged file or filesystem or in some cases a compatibility issue between OS X and the NAS or destination filesystem you use. If you get an unexpected large number of "copy failed" error messages to a NAS, please make sure that your NAS has the latest firmware. More information about those types of issues is usually visible in the console.log which can be viewed with Console.app in Utilities. Please note that SmartBackup will use a wider set of filesystem features compared to a Finder copy or other tools and as a consequence might encounter issues that are otherwise hidden.

If you get stuck, just contact us for further help. Please make sure to include all the relevant information, especially when network destinations are involved. A copy of the backup log is always useful too.

The speed of a backup is basically defined by the speed of the underlying storage. It depends on IO and throughput characteristics, two different parameters which become especially relevant when backing up to a network share. Note that it is not as simple as just the harddisk or network speed itself.

A common mistake for instance is that an external harddisk which was sold formatted using a Windows filesystem (FAT32) has not been re-formatted using Disk Utility to have an Apple Filesystem (HFS). Backing up to FAT32 will be significantly slower than to HFS.

In general following factors (where applicable) need to be considered:

• disk throughput or network speed (mainly affecting the speed of copying changed items)
• disk latency or network latency (mainly affecting analyse speed)
• fileserver / NAS server performance (affecting both analyse and copy speed)
• performance of the network protocol used (WebDAV for instance is very slow compared to AFP etc)
• performance of the OS X filesystem client implementation (relevant especially on non HFS filesystems like FAT)
• performance of the OS X network protocol client implementation (AFP is faster than SMB etc.)

When backing up to a network share, a couple of the above bottlenecks can be avoided by backing up into a HFS sparse disk image. To do this, create a sparse disk image using Disk Utility, copy it to the network share, and use the mounted image as your backup destination.