.Mac
Since I bought the iMac back in January, I’d been looking for an easy and elegant backup solution for OS X. Sure, Time Machine is coming with OS X 10.5 but I wanted to get started on the backups straight away. I’d tried Synk and Carbon Copy Cloner (both excellent and powerful in their own right) but something drew me to Apple’s Backup and then indeed .Mac. I’d never really ‘got’ the whole .mac thing. I mean I understood what it was and how it worked but it never seemed worth the (lets admit it, kind of expensive) price-tag of €99.00 per year.
So I decided to bite the bullet and sign-up for all this integrated .mac goodness I’d been reading about. So far, I have to say so-good. Backup is working as expected, elegantly! Though I’m still using Carbon Copy Cloner to make duplicate backups of some important stuff. Yes, I’ve become paranoid about backing up! The thoughts of loosing so many pictures, documents, files, old websites and music is too much to contemplate so it’s worth the effort to have good (and more importantly, regular) backups.
.Mac is definitely worth it if you have two or more Mac’s. Now that the PowerBook has a new lease of life, she is regularly enjoying syncing her bookmarks, calendars, mail accounts, keychains etc. etc. with the iMac. I like the whole idea of publishing calendars too. It’s actually started to make me plan things better. For example my working calendar now helps me keep track of what gigs I’m doing in the G and the like. Very handy indeed, and made handier when everything syncs to my phone so it’s with me on the move.
The iDisk is nice too, having an extra 1GB of online storage is always very handy and it works with Windows too for those occasions where I have to venture into the world of XP etc.
So all-in-all the first month has been quite positive, it’ll be interesting to see if I’ll want to fork over another €99 again next year. Time will tell I suppose!
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