There once was a time when Mac backup apps were rare and difficult to setup and use. One of my first backup apps, from back in the day when the whole process of backing up was tedious, was a Mac preference pane app called Déjà Vu.
To quote former Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, it’s Déjà Vu all over again.
Instead of a standalone app that you run manually, Déjà Vu resides in your Mac’s System Preferences and can perform daily backups, as well as weekly, or monthly, or manually.
There’s nothing complex about Déjà Vu on the surface. Select what to backup, and where to back it up.
Use Déjà Vu to select specific folders on your Mac, or the whole Home director, or the whole Mac. Déjà Vu can create a bootable copy of your Mac’s disk drive, a complete clone of every file.
There’s a built-in safety net function, cleverly called Safety Net. It archives changed or deleted files instead of deleting them.
Déjà Vu can also connect to a remote Mac or server and backup files across the network. And, like all good Mac backup citizens, this one does a full backup of selected files, but only an incremental backup of changed files, which speeds up the backup process.
There’s also a useful mirroring function which keeps two folders between Macs completely in sync. Delete a file from one, and Déjà Vu makes sure it’s deleted from the other.
Déjà Vu has been around a few years and the feature set is limited compared to some newer Mac backup apps, but setup is simple for Mac newbies and the blend of features make it attractive.