Memeo LifeAgent Review

If you’re dissatisfied with Leopard’s Time Machine, Memeo’s alternative solution for the Mac OS X, LifeAgent ($29.99, free 30-day trial), lets you back up important files to a network folder, a removable drive, or as a partition on your hard drive (it’s also compatible with Flickr, .Mac iDisk, and Memeo iDisk). The setup wizard walked us through a brief series of steps that let us choose the number of copies of each file the software would create, add encryption (so that we can recover files within only Memeo), create a password, and select which files we’d like to back up. The entire process took less than a minute.

We backed up 30GB of content to an external hard drive in 45 minutes (the best backup time of the three solutions we’ve tested). After that, we simply sat back and relaxed as LifeAgent instantly backed up new docs and changes made to pre-existing files—no need to wait for timed hourly backups as we would when using Time Machine. Even better, we were able to create multiple backup destinations so that we could save files across multiple drives simultaneously, such as to our MacBook’s hard drive as well as to a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini external drive.

As with the other backup drives, we were able to back up an office document while we were working within it, which is extremely handy if you don’t want to stop what you’re doing. Should you need to use a previous version of a file, the Restore button lets you resurrect an individual file to an entire folder and save it to the original location, desktop, or a new folder. Memeo LifeAgent 2.2.89 is a strong option for Mac users who want to try something different.