Lifeboat support

Your backups stay readable. Lifeboat stores them in the open restic format, and restic is free open source software for Mac, Linux and Windows. With the password from your emergency sheet you can list and restore every backup in Terminal, without Lifeboat. Step by step guide.

Lifeboat backs up your files: the home folder with documents, photos, mail and settings. It does not make a bootable copy and does not restore a whole Mac with apps and system in one step. Many people keep Time Machine on a second disk and use Lifeboat for an offsite copy on a NAS or in the cloud. Two independent backups are better than one (the 3-2-1 rule).

Only where you choose: on your disk, your NAS or in your own cloud storage bucket (for example Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Amazon S3 or Hetzner). I do not run a backup server and never see your files. restic encrypts everything with AES-256 before it leaves your Mac. The key comes from your password, which only you know.

You pay your provider directly. Prices change, so please check the provider's site. As an example: Cloudflare lists R2 at $0.015 per GB and month with the first 10 GB free and no fees for downloading. A 200 GB backup would cost about $2.85 a month. Before the first upload, Lifeboat shows the estimated size of your backup.

Once a week Lifeboat picks 200 random files that have not changed on your Mac since the newest backup, restores them from that backup into a temporary folder, and compares each one byte for byte (SHA-256) with the original. The result lands on the overview: “verified 2 days ago, 200 of 200 match”. Once a month it also reads 5% of the stored data and checks it. The status is green only if a probe passed in the last 14 days.

Then nobody can read the backup, not even me. That is how the encryption works. During setup Lifeboat creates an emergency sheet (PDF) with the password and the steps to restore. Print it and keep it away from your Mac.

Lifeboat stays free with 1 disk on schedule, restore probes, data checks and restoring from every destination. Pro unlocks network shares, cloud storage, several destinations at once and your own rules for old versions, for €39 once, on 2 Macs. Restoring is never locked.

Backups are about trust, so Lifeboat starts as a public beta (version 0.9) for at least four weeks before 1.0. During the beta, please keep your current backup running alongside Lifeboat. Feedback is very welcome.

macOS protects folders like Mail, Messages, Safari and parts of Library. Without Full Disk Access, restic cannot read them and those files would be missing from your backup. Lifeboat reads files only to back them up. The setup explains this and opens the right place in System Settings.

A disk (USB, Thunderbolt, formatted APFS or Mac OS Extended), a network share over SMB (for example a Synology or QNAP NAS), and S3-compatible storage: Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Amazon S3, Hetzner Object Storage or any other S3 endpoint. The free plan covers one disk.

restic finished, but some files could not be read, for example because another app had them locked. Lifeboat never shows such a run as “backed up” and lists the files in the history.

In Settings › General › Support, or in the command palette (⌘K). Lifeboat copies versions, permissions, destination types and the last results to the clipboard, always in English. It contains no file names and no passwords. Paste it into your email to [email protected].

One license works on 2 Macs at a time. For a third Mac, choose Settings › License › Remove from This Mac on one of them first, then activate the key on the new one.

English and German.