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IF YOU HAVE ever had a hard drive fail, you know how true it is that there's nothing like a failed hard drive to reveal the adequacy of (or lack thereof) one's backup procedures. SubRosaSoft's CopyCatX 2.5 takes a very simple approach to backing up; it sends in the clones. The program uses "device-to-device copying" instead of "file-by-file" copying, which is employed by most backup software. This makes an exact duplicate of one drive to another. The advantage of this approach is that it is very fast, and it copies everything—from the ability to boot off that device to the locations of your folders and icons.
If you always want to duplicate your entire drive, this will work just fine, but it won't synchronize changes (which is still the fastest way to back up, once you have performed an initial backup). We backed up the 80GB hard drive in our 17" PowerBook in just less than two hours over a FireWire 400 connection. This is very fast for that much data, and it's a great option for doing those weekly and monthly backups, because you can be certain that your backup drive is identical to the state of your "work" drive when you backed it up.
Curiously, the user manual suggests you back up your data before using CopyCatX 2.5, so in case "anything goes wrong (power blackout, OS error or hardware failure, etc...), you will be able to recover your data." We found this a bit bizarre. SubRosaSoft wants you to back up your data before using the program to backup your data? As far as we can tell, the program does nothing destructive, but because it must unmount both the source and destination drives before it can do the backup, it is probably good advice.
–CHUCK ROGERS
CopyCatX 2.5: 
SubRosaSoft | www.subrosasoft.com | $60
Pros: Nice interface, fast, can copy iPod drives as well, can also back up to a disk image.
Cons: Must boot from CD to copy your startup hard drive, no ability to schedule backups, too expensive for a "one trick pony" program.
Requires: OS 10.2.8 or higher, CD Drive
macHOME recommends: OS 10.3 or higher
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