.Mac

One of the upsell offerings made to me when purchasing the new machine was a discount on a .Mac account.

.Mac was described to me as an email and web publishing account. I declined an initial purchase, even at a discount, since my Google hosted domain already provides these services. I was informed that the discount would remain available to me for 14 days, and that a free trial of .Mac was available.

Prior to starting my free trial, I did some research into reviews of the service. I was quite surprised by the degree of visceral hatred expressed in many of the reviews.

However, the theme of the negative reviews was a common one. To paraphrase them:

“The Man wants $99/year for this service, and it’s only 1GB of disk space; fight the power. Here’s how you can get the same thing for free by simply running these twelve different applications, only three of which are in direct violation of Google’s Terms of Service.”

Hmmm….been there, done that, no longer interested. Perhaps I’m getting old; the enjoyment I once derived from manually integrating half-baked solutions seems to be waning. My interest was piqued. To the trial!

The web publisher, iWeb, does indeed seem to be ridiculously easy to use, but it’s probably not something I’ll make any use of in the near term.

The mail service is well, mail. Simple, easy to use, seems to have quality spam filtering. Comes with a trendy @mac.com address identifying one as a member of the hip digerati. Nice, but I’ve got Gmail, so again, not something I’m likely to make much use of.

Photo sharing/publishing, nicely integrated with iPhoto, is the next component of interest. We’re always sharing pictures with the rest of the family, so this is likely something that’ll see some use. Getting warmer….

Next up, backup. Now this gets interesting. The .Mac subscription includes a very nice backup utility; I’m quite impressed by the manner in which the typical features of backup have been supplied in what is a very user-friendly application. It includes scheduling support, simple specification of backup sets, the ability to back up to disks, CDs and DVDs, and, most importantly, online backup.

Online backup is performed to the ‘iDisk’, a webdav-hosted volume located on Apple’s servers. 1GB of space is provided, initially split evenly between mail and general disk space. This allocation can be adjusted via a control panel on the .Mac site.

In my opinion, iDisk is what makes the offering compelling. The iDisk appears as a virtual drive, with locally cached synchronization similar to that provided by AFS or DFS filesystems in the Unix world. While it works as a regular filesystem, the OS also exposes APIs by which applications can synchronize data to it. As examples, browser bookmarks and passwords can be automatically synchronized to the .Mac account for safekeeping and to allow consistency of these items on different machines. While I’ve only got a single Mac, Sensei Patrick does have quite a stable of them; he does make extensive use of this feature.

The iDisk is also available to Windows systems, via both a thick-client solution and a web-based interface. Handy when traveling.

The killer feature to me was Quicken’s built-in support of .Mac, allowing for zero-intervention, automated offsite backup to be performed each time Quicken is closed.

While 1GB of storage does seem paltry these days, it suffices for my personal data — documents, source code, financial data, and other records. These are critically important, but they don’t take up a lot of space. Thus, for my important data, 1GB is generous. Seamless integration and the ability to access this data easily from anywhere makes this to me a substantial value. Further, no one seems to pay list price for .Mac; Amazon is presently selling the yearly subscriptions for $20 less than list, and seems to have done so for some time.

However, discounted or not, I spend more per year on bathroom tissue. .Mac makes offsite backup painless; the price seems reasonable to me for the peace of mind provided.

 

Tags: Backup