Password managers and generators have been around for a long time. Some of them are plain useless, others look OK but you can’t help wonder how secure your data really is with them. And then there’s that third category: applications that just work well and really secure your data. 1Password belongs to that category. It stores your passwords and secure data in Apple’s own keychain file. That file uses TripleDES to encrypt the password field of every keychain entry. TDES still is considered a highly secure algorithm, and Apple’s weight behind it means that if you decide to stop upgrading 1Password, you won’t lose any data.
FileGuard X5 is Intego’s idea of securing your data. It is comparable to Knox, another application which allows you to create disk images that you can secure with a password and encryption --a bit like Disk Utility, but with a couple of extras.
Prosoft Engineering developed Drive Genius 2 to be extremely easy to use and yet have all the functionality you expect from a first-class system utilities suite. Drive Genius 2 has a science-fiction startup interface, but once you get past that, it becomes a regular Mac OS X program.
Archiving to off-line media is a good idea, but it can be difficult to remember what exactly was on the media you archived to in the first place. Many disc catalogue programs will enable you to collect data about what’s on the disc, but often that data will be little more than the file names of the files and folders on that disc. DiskLibrary differs in that it will allow you to catalogue the media data itself.
SmartBackup is a small application developed by Freeridecoding. It is small in memory footprint, and in visual appearance, but rather big in what it does: backing up and synchronising, and even creating bootable backups.
Personal Backup X5 is Intego’s latest version of the backup program that handles bootable copies as well as ordinary backups and folder or disk synchronisation. I ran Personal Backup through a number of tests and found it to be a solid performer.
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