I'm going to have to defend this title after drtimhill's double-post. I've been using Chronosync for nearly two years now. I'll admit that the interface is a bit daunting, but that's to be expected in a SYNC app. Backups are a simple operation. Syncing is never simple because there are so many ways to go about it depending on what you want to accomplish. The good news is that Chronosync can be configured in almost every fashion.
Want to backup your Home folder except for the Sites folder? No problem. Go to "Rules," select Advanced, and "Exclude" the "File or Folder's path" containing "/Users/YourUserName/Sites." Not the simplest method, but it's broken down this way to allow you to customize each bit.
The claim of no more than 100Kb/sec is a serious exaggeration. Seriously, just what are your settings? Are you backing up to a USB thumb-drive? For me, it runs at about 80% the speed of Finder's Copy over firewire (I confess it is not nearly as fast as using "cp" in the shell, but good enough).
Oh, and there's an OPTION to skip errors and just save them to a log. Some want immediate notification, others do not. Chronosync gives you both. I don't want a sync to be interrupted, so I set it to skip and then check the log afterwards.
However, I DID get hit with that odd bug where it did not recognize the network-mounted drive. I had to re-drag the volume to the "source" window. It was fine after that, so I'm unable to repeat the issue.
One of my favorite features is to have it sync when it detects a mounted drive. A great feature for syncing your portable device with your desktop before leaving.
Bottom line is that this app will do everything, but you have to read the instructions and get a feel for it. If your needs are much simpler, than get the simple app. I, however, wanted to handle all of my backup and sync tasks with one piece of software, so I got Chronosync.
- Jim