Synk 5.1

I like the interface and features of Ben Rister’s Synk, but though 5.0 was reliable, it was also slow and memory-hungry. The just-released version 5.1 is supposed to fix that. When Apple announced that Tiger would include a Mac-savvy rsync, I figured that I wouldn’t be needing Synk any more. Because it takes advantage of the fact that the destination machine can do stuff, rsync is much faster than other such utilities I’ve used. However, rsync -E has so far not been reliable. I continue to use Synk, and early indications are that it is indeed faster and uses much less RAM. Ben has provided good, friendly support, and you can’t beat his guarantee.

Retrospect 6.0.212

As promised, Dantz released a free update that makes Retrospect compatible with Tiger. I’m quite happy to be able to back up again, but the performance of the new version leaves a lot to be desired. With no other applications running, Retrospect backed up at a rate of 29.9 MB/min (software compression, no encryption) to a file storage set on an external FireWire drive. (I haven’t tested the DVD performance yet.) I cannot make a definitive comparison with the previous version on Panther, because the first time I started 6.0.212 it deleted my existing Operations Log. However, as I recall, it used to get at least 150 MB/min when backing up to a hard disk.

Backup Compression Mac Mac App Retrospect

When Mail Snapshots Attachments

Pierre Igot:

In Mail, the encoding of the attached file takes place immediately when you attach the file. In other words, when you attach a file to an e-mail message in Mail, Mail actually copies the file in encoded form into the body of the e-mail message. If, after that, you leave your message window open and return to your original file in its parent application and continue editing and saving it, this will not affect the version of the file that’s included in the e-mail message that you’ve left open in Mail.

In a vacuum, I think a good case could be made that Mail 2.0’s behavior is correct, but it differs from the way Mac mail programs have traditionally worked.