14 DAY TRIAL // California-based app4mac announced on Monday the release of the first beta version of the company's Twin 1.1, the online backup solution for Mac OS X. The solution comes to all Mac users with an elegant interface, featuring a powerful assistant. Twin has compatibility with most Internet servers: FTP, FTPS, SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, MobileMe, and even features support for offline backup on external drives.
As a true Mac product, Twin preserves Finder info, as well as resource forks, ACLs and Privileges. The solution includes a wide range of high-end features, such as AES-256 encryption, efficient bz2 compression, powerful exclusion rules and scheduler, not to mention support for splitting large files during network transfers, network-error recovery, and individual digital signature for backed up files or optimization for multi-core machines.
Some of the main features of Twin include an intuitive user interface that sports a powerful Backup Assistant meant to easy the creation of online backups. Moreover, users are also able to either restore the entire backup or to browse for specific files or directories to restore. The solution is not only intuitive, but reliable as well, and it can handle very large data sets (hundreds of gigabytes and dozens of thousands of files). It fully preserves file metadata, and also enables faster backups or restoration of files.
At the same time, the solution provides compatibility with most online servers, as it features support forWebDAV (over HTTP or HTTPS), AFP, SMB, FTP, FTPS, SFTP, Amazon S3 (over HTTP or HTTPS), as well as Apple iDisk. The solution automatically excludes unnecessary data from the backup, and enables users to exclude custom files as well. Moreover, it can be set to run automatic backups at certain times or in specific conditions.
The security features of Twin are also an important area, as the solution has top-grade AES-256 encryption, which has been approved by the US Government to protect classified information. The optimization features that the solution comes with allow it to run in the background without slowing down the system, and users can also limit the maximum network bandwidth it should access.
Twin 1.1 Beta 1 can be used on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Compared to the previous version, it features better performance, better support for FTP, Amazon S3 and AFP servers, updated user interface, and a series of bug fixes. According to the company, the full version of Twin will become available starting June 29. The price for the solution has been set at 29 Euros (around $40), yet this is only a promotion that will last until the end of June. At the moment, Twin 1.1 Beta 1 supports English and French with a full documentation.
The Twin 1.1 Beta 1 is available for download on Softpedia as well, via this link.