Dare to be Creative has released Parachute 1.1 (http://parachut.in/), an update of the backup application for Mac OS X. The upgrade offers secure backups over encrypted FTP, features full 64-bit support and ships with a faster backup engine.
Parachute allows users to run automated, scheduled backups to a wide range of destinations, including FTP/SFTP servers, external disks, and iDisk. Users can setup multiple backup tasks, consisting of a list of files they would like to backup, and either a local or server destination to make the backups to. Possible local destinations include the hard disk, externals disks, and USB flash drives, while server destinations include FTP, SFTP and WebDAV servers, as well as iDisk. Each backup tasks can be scheduled to run automatically in hourly, daily, weekly or monthly intervals.
Philipp Mayerhofer, chief operational officer at Dare to be Creative sees Parachute more as a Time Machine companion than a competitor. “Every backup application on the Mac will invariably be compared to Time Machine, but Parachute isn’t intended to replace Time Machine but to complement it, offering multiple backups to a wide choice of destinations,” he says.
Parachute requires Mac OS X 10.5 or higher. It’s Universal Binary so runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. A 15-day demo is available for download.
Parachute costs US$39. Version 1.1 is a free update for registered users.