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Backups. What can you say: you've gotta' do 'em. If you're just archiving your personal stuff, it's pretty easy. Make a copy. Store it someplace else. Automate it so you don't forget. Got a small network? That's still doable, although a bit more complicated. A bigger network? Now that's not going to come without some pain. Let's try to keep the discomfort to a minimum.

Amanda is a free, open source, backup solution. It's not something you're going to use for just your personal stuff, since there's servers involved, but if you've got a bunch of machines to watch over, it may be worth a try. You install the server piece on a Linux box—it needs to use tar, awk, Samba, and Perl—and then a client app on each machine you want to back up. There's a client available for Windows, Mac (OS X), and all sorts of other Unix-like systems. It boasts an easy, well-documented setup process, and gives you the option of backing up to disk or tape, or even both at the same time. And since it uses tar and other native tools, if everything goes sideways, you can still restore without Amanda being available.

You can grab a copy of Amanda for free. They've also got paid versions available if you want to save your backups in the Cloud.

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Everybody likes pretty pictures. Whether it's a still photo that's worth a thousand words, or the latest viral video that everybody's talking about, there's certainly no end of non-text information out there on the Web. While we do enjoy the pix and clips, sometimes we'd rather not have to deal with them. After all, just 'cause you love liver and onions doesn't mean you want to have them for breakfast.

BashFlash is a tool you can use to dial back on Flash movies. Maybe your Internet connection speed is running a bit slow today, or perhaps you're on your laptop out in the middle of nowhere and don't want to run down your battery on this stuff. Either way, now you can be in complete control.

When you fire it up, it lives on the Menubar, so you're not losing a bunch of screen real estate or further filling your already-bloated Dock. You can run it at will, or have it start when you login.

BashFlash is a Mac application. It's available for Intel-powered machines, and runs under OS X 10.5 and 10.6 (Leopard and Snow Leopard) with various combinations of Safari, Firefox, and Google's Chrome browser.

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Sometimes it's better not to see everything you're working with. If you've ever stashed your stuff quickly in a closet, or swept things under the rug (literally or figuratively) then you know that your life can go more smoothly if you don't have everything always up in your face. Your computer is set up with some similar ideas in mind.

With Windows, you've got the notion of "hidden files", files which by default aren't visible to you through Windows Explorer. On a Linux system, or other Unix-like box, there are "dot files"—those files which have a period as the first character in their filenames. Those files are hidden by default; if you really need to see them, you have to go out of your way to do so. On the Mac, similar behavior is available: dot files are hidden by default, but there are also file attributes that can be set to make your files invisible in Finder. If you've got the Developer Tools installed on your system and you're not afraid of Terminal, you can effect these types of changes yourself. For everybody else, there's Ghost.

With this tool, it's easy to hide or reveal files or folders. Declutter your windows by hiding some of the unnecessary stuff, or take a look at what Finder's hiding from you by un-hiding files. Remember, this isn't really a security thing—"security by obscurity" isn't a viable plan—but for general "let me stuff this in the closet to get it out of the way" tidying-up, it's not a bad deal.

Ghost is a free download, and should run on your recent Mac.

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If you spend your life on Twitter, it might be nice to have a record of your "Tweets". Unfortunately there's no built-in way to do that. Sure, your old posts are always there in your Profile page, but as well all know, sometimes Twitter can have, ummm, issues. The only totally safe way to keep track of what you've Tweeted is to save it yourself.

TwitterBackup is an aptly named application that allows you to do just that. Fire it up, give it your Twitter login credentials, and it will grab a copy of what you've done out there. It saves things off in an XML file on your local drive, so you can access it with any text editor. While it's doing its thing, it performs an "incremental backup", so it only adds newer Tweets to what you've already got backed up.

You can grab TwitterBackup for free. It's a Java application, so you should be able to run it on any system that has the appropriate Java runtime installed on it.

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Do you ever get interrupted in the middle of something? Maybe somebody walks into the room. Maybe the phone rings. Maybe you have a "senior moment" and forget what you're doing. For some things, that's okay. If you're in the middle of a drag-and-drop file operation, that's not such a good thing. Once your finger comes up off that mouse button, there's no telling where that important file has landed. Maybe you'll find it, maybe you won't. Well, yes, you'll find it, but it's going to take you ten minutes to do so, and you might have better ways to spend that time. At times like this, it might be handy to have XShelf.

This app lets you move files around your system in stages. When you use Finder to move a file from Desktop into your Documents folder, typically you need to have windows for both folders visible on your screen at the same time. With XShelf, you grab your file and drag it into the XShelf window. Later, you drag it from there into your destination folder to complete the move. At that point, the drag-and-drop is completed, as if the intermediate step had never existed. You can set it to float on screen as its own window, or you can have it grab onto an edge of your display, like the Dock, so it's always available. You can even have it auto-hide so it's not taking up space when you're not using it.

XShelf is a free Mac application. The current version requires OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later.

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Lots of folks see OS X as a "better" operating system than Windows, and of course there are those who see things exactly opposite of that. If we could all agree on what "better" means, there might be valid grounds for comparison, but until that day, it's going to be more a comparison of features that lets anyone decide which system they prefer.

In a discussion of features, it's easier to make comparisons. System Registry, Resource Forks—everybody's got a different way of looking at the world, and that world view is embodied in their systems. One thing's for sure though: Windows has a specific application uninstaller, and Mac doesn't. For many less complicated OS X programs, simply deleting the application itself gets rid of the app. With others, though, there are pieces left here and there across the whole system, with preference files and data files and all manner of other stuff out there. Delete the app and you still have all this other stuff out there taking up space.

TrashMe is a tool that can help your Mac really delete applications that you want to get rid of. It's smart enough to recognize that you just dragged an application to the Trash and to go out and find all those other bits and get rid of them at the same time. Or you can get all organized and delete apps from a list. If you're afraid of trashing stuff that you really still need, don't: you can protect the apps that came with your system, or any other programs you need to make sure stay in one piece on your machine. It even keeps a log of the stuff you've deleted, presumably allowing you to undo things if you catch them soon enough.

TrashMe is compatible with systems running OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

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One of our favorite rants is on the importance of maintaining good backups. You can have the best website or the most significant report or the most important email in the world, but when your hard drive dies or your office is flooded or some other calamity strikes, all your good turns to you-know-what. You've got to back up your stuff early and often.

Bonkey is a free tool that helps make it easier to take are of business. It's actually got a couple of different pieces. You can automate the backup process by creating schedules for your backups and selecting what you want to back up, whether it's a file, a folder, or a whole volume. You also get to choose where your backups are going to go. Select a local drive, a network share, or remote locations accessible via FTP or SFTP. It even lets you backup into Amazon's S3 world, giving you basically unlimited capacity for storing your backups. This app also has a handy multi-paned interface that lets you drag-and-drop files between and among different locations.

The setup seems a little tricky, and even though it runs on Macs under OS X, it doesn't know anything about Resource Forks, so your Finder info and maybe more will be missing from your backed-up files if you ever have need to restore them.

Bonkey is a free download, with flavors for both Windows and Mac users.

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Some people are never satisfied. Give 'em cake and they want pie. Give 'em a bunch of files and they don't like the file names. Well, it's not so easy to convert cake to pie, but you can, with a reasonable effort, rename files.

Tweaking the name of a file or three in Finder isn't the biggest deal in the world. Once you go much beyond that number, however, the task starts to get a bit more tedious. That's where it's handy to have a dedicated file renaming tool to help you with the job.

Rename—an aptly named tool if ever there were one—is an app to rename files. You can change one file or a whole pile of them. While it's not a full-featured renaming tool—you can't do a find-and-replace type of rename, for example, it can do an adequate job of adding or removing text from the beginning or end of your filenames, including serializing them. It also lets you stuff Spotlight Tags into your files, but it appears to stick the same tag into all of them—useful if you're marking your vacation photos with "Our Trip to the Shore" or some such.

A free download, Rename is a Mac application. It's happy as a clam running under OS X Tiger (10.4).

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Did you ever get a file—probably an important one—in a format you couldn't open because you didn't have the right application? That FLAC audio file or RAR archive isn't going to do you any good if you can't open it. You need to be able to convert files from what you can't use into files you can use.

Dragoman is a Mac-based batch file conversion tool. It does the standard stuff—convert your images to PDFs or turn Word DOCs into text files—but also maybe some things you didn't expect, like converting between various archive formats. It's easy to use—the "drag" part of its name suggests the type of interface, although the Help file explains that the word is actually of Middle Eastern origin and means "translator".

Just drag your document or media file onto the app. It recognizes the type of file you've got and displays an appropriate list of file formats that you can choose from to do your conversion. It supports a pretty good sized list of archive, audio, image, and text file formats, and even though there are some popular formats it can't translate into, even some of those can serve as the source for translation into formats it can work with.

Dragoman is a free Mac application. It runs under OS X version 10.4 (Tiger) and later.

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Is "Move to Trash" your favorite command? As you work through your day, writing this and drawing that, you generate a bunch of junk—or at least "works in progress"—that you delete as you continue to fine-tune your work. Since you're getting better and better you know that you're not going to want to re-use this stuff; after all, you did throw it in the Trash. But as you know, just 'cause you threw it away doesn't mean that that file or document has really gone away. It just sits there waiting for you to decide what to do about it.

TrashTimer is an app for your Mac that automatically empties the Trash for you. You choose the frequency—maybe once an hour, maybe once a day—and all your junk will magically disappear. Once the Trash is emptied, you get that disk space back, so you can continue to create cool stuff. This tool is a preference panel instead of a "regular" app, so it's not going to take up any space on your Dock.

Since it's a Universal Binary, TrashTimer will run on your PowerPC or Intel-flavored Mac. It runs under OS X 10.3 and later.

Download TrashTimer