It is common knowledge that after Tally reintroduced me to the world of NNTP, I have come to depend on News for my very life. An endless source of latest distros and what not, the NNTP experience can be as good as, or as horrid as your News Reader.

For ages I had relied on Outlook Express on XP for my needs, and graduated to Newsleecher on Vista. By far the best news reader for that platform. But on OSX one is usually stymied. There were quite a few freeware solutions from the days of Carbon and OS 9, which quite frankly look just horrible on Leopard. Enter Unison by Panic. Quite frankly the best app out there for News reading/downloading for any platform. The UI is a lesson in how to do things right, living it up in true OSX tradition. One can view the news in threaded view, or files view or if the fancy be, in the Image cluster view. Intuitive and quite straightforward and yet wrought in this, is a lesson in usability. Available as a limited time free trail, it is a software well worth the money.

Recently though, needing to restore my Mac, I needed to backup my number of favorite Newsgroups which I bookmark and check from time to time.  I contacted Panic support, and got a quick reply. Turns out it is very straightforward indeed (but of course). All one needs to do before a system restore on a Mac is to back up the App folder in ~/Library/Application Support/Unison and the prefs list file found in ~/Library/Preferences/com.panic.unison.plist. Restore the same after a reformat and Tim’s your uncle.