.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.
Winclone
Installing XP under Boot Camp is the Way of the Many Reboots; it takes just short of forever to get all the patches installed, even when starting from an SP2 base. Not something you want to have to do twice, but none of the usual backup utilities will backup or restore a Boot Camp partition.
Fortunately, there’s Winclone, a free utility to address this problem.
So far as I’ve been able to determine, Winclone is the only way to easily and reliably backup and restore a Boot Camp partition; I’m surprised that it’s not getting more press.
Winclone handles both XP and Vista partitions.
SuperDuper!
I classify backups into three categories:
- Bootable full backup
- Local backup of user files
- Offsite backup of user files
I was doing a decent job of the two user file backups under Windows, but the bootable full backup was a different story.
I used Norton Ghost to back up my Windows main drive to a backup drive. The version of Ghost I was using didn’t do hot backups while the system was live; rather, it took the system down to a custom DOS program while the backup ran. And ran. And ran.
The thing took forever, and the system was unusable during the multi-hour process. As a result, I seldom did full backups like this. It was fortunate that the main drive was a RAID, since my backups were always out of date.
I resolved to do a better job on the shiny new Mac Pro. Given my past experience, it was evident to me that I needed a backup utility that:
- produced bootable full backups
- ran in a reasonable amount of time
- was completely reliable
- could run while the system was up
- could be automated, so it could be used every day
Requirements in hand; off to Google for some research. Some poking around revealed two excellent posts on the plasticsfuture blog:
These are both epic posts, with excellent commentary. You could spend days following up on all the pointers provided therein, and I did — I must have tested nearly every backup product available.
And, as with many others, I settled on SuperDuper! as my weapon of choice. It’s simple, fast, reliable, produces bootable hot backups, and can be scheduled to run automatically. The vendor provides a free version which will, under manual control, clone a drive; one couldn’t ask for a much better trial than this. For $27.95 USD, scheduling, incremental backups, and other features are unlocked.
My system now performs an incremental bootable clone every morning at 3 am, without intervention, utterly reliably, in very little time, for about one-third the cost of a comparable Windows cloning utility.
I’m really starting to love this platform.