This is a very promising software with convenient functionalities and ease of use, but it has a very serious - and I mean SERIOUS - issue as of version 1.2.
This issue is indicated only as a "limitation" of the developer's site: "The initial backup requires as much extra space on the boot volume as the total size of the data being backed up".
And what they do not say is that it can saturate your boot volume in a snap, covering your screen with litterally hundreds of error messages. Your only option is to kill the process and navigate to a invisible folder to delete its temporary files to get your disk space back (which is in /private/var/folders/ in case you desperately need it).
A very bad user experience indeed...
I really hope they will soon fix this issue as I need this type of software because Time Machine cannot backup to a NAS server... But as of version 1.2 it is useless.
Mathusalem
Robust and unintrusive backup system.
Version: 1.6
Nice utility but has a very serious issue
Feedback Type: Review
Contributed by: Rach Tuesday, August 26 2008 @ 12:31 AM PDT
Product Platform: MacOSX
Used Product For: Less than a month
Recommend Product: NO
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Nice utility but has a very serious issue - Pol-Online
First an important disclaimer: Mathusalem is not intended to clone an entire volume: it's not Time Machine. Mathusalem is only intended to backup to a remote destination a subset of your disk representing your most important data like your documents, email and photos.Version 1.2 indeed has an issue in which it wasn't checking for free space on disk before starting the backup: this is fixed in 1.3.
With version 1.2 and earlier, you will only end up saturating your disk if you attempt to make a very large backup, so extremely few users have it the issue according to the reports. Also, snapshot space should be automatically be reclaimed when Mathusalem quits, but it couldn't be the case for you since had to kill Mathusalem.
In any case, since the snapshot is in the temporary directory, all you need to do is restart your Mac to clear it.
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Monday, September 01 2008 @ 12:33 AM PDT