In response to my request for feedback in my original article, PowerPage readers have come through with a couple of gems, at price points above and below ChronoSync US$20 and Personal BackupUS$60.

At US$15, IMSafe from SweetCocoa is a beautiful and simple backup utility, that I initially preferred to ChronoSync. With its clean interface and minimal intervention on the part of the user, I was ready to switch, but when I took out my stopwatch, I found that the time IMSafe took to compare two 2GB folders with approximately a dozen changed files out of 2,000 was nearly four times as long as ChronoSync. For me, this is a typical backup at the end of the day via a bus-powered FireWire drive.

At US$100 Synchronize! X Pro by Qdea is the hands down winner among these four backup and synchronize utilities. It was as if they read my original review and implemented all of the features I requested. There's a setting that allows a backup to begin automatically after a user specified delay and another setting to allow the file to close or the program to automatically quit.

Like ChronoSync, scripts are saved as individual files, but user intervention can be absolutely minimized and the degree of customization is formidable. The real surprise however was speed. Synchronize! X Pro flies. It was nearly twice as fast as ChronoSync at comparing the same 2GB folders and in fact has allowed me to simplify my backup strategy by creating a single script that will compare more than 5GB of data in several folders that include all of my archives and photographs.

At only US$30 Qdea also offers Synchronize! X Plus which will back up data, but not an entire bootable system. I did hear from the folks at ChronoSync and it is now possible to "Skip Completion Summary", eliminating one step in the process of making a backup and they say they are close to implementing bootable volumes, which will make ChronoSync a tremendous bargain.