Apple’s Backup utility, which receives a lot of flack for requiring a .mac account to allow you to use it, even if you’re backing up to a local CD or DVD, is actually quite a useful and powerful tool.

I’m in the midst of recovering from a hard disk failure on my iMac, and I was able to back up everything important to a couple of DVDs before I lost total control of the beast.

Rather than backup up to some complicated, proprietary, compressed backup format that requires the original software to restore from, opening the DVD on my iBook reveals the files I backed up, in the original directory structure, ready for use.

Wonderful.