April 26th, 2010, 9 Comments »
I recently wrote about the unreliability of all of the Apple computers I’ve ever bought. Last night, my iMac failed to start up, displaying a big white screen and what I came to understood as the ‘Forbidden’ icon. It made me miss the venerable Macintosh bomb icon.
This brings the number of Apple computers that have fatally failed within two years of my owning them to four. Here’s what my sad computer looked like:
Despite my distaste for the Uber-branded Orwellian weirdness that is the Apple Store, I took my iMac in. They decided that it was merely a ‘system problem’, not a hardware issue. So, we backed up my computer to a newly-purchased hard drive and they wiped the thing clean.
As I write this blog post, my CD drive is spinning and installing the dreck that is Microsoft Office for Mac 2004.
I suspected that my hard drive had died. It wouldn’t have been a big deal, as I do most of my work on the web and, besides, I had backed up about six weeks ago.
A License to Download, Once
However, I had bought about $20 worth of iTunes music recently. Most people know this, but I think it bears repeating: you can only download an iTunes song once. When you buy it, you’re buying, what? A license to play the song, and the right to download the thing once.
It would have been ironic in my case, as my Apple hardware failure would have vapourized a bunch of my Apple digital assets.
This policy, by the way, is farcical. Every other digital content vendor that I’ve used–Audible, for example, or PC games from Steam–enables me to download my purchases over and over again. This feature is particularly handy when my Apple computer stops working.
Truth be told, if my hard drive had failed, and I’d lost that music, my first tactic would have been to try to download it illegally. After all, I’d paid Apple, the artists and all the stakeholders once, why should I pay them again?
9 Comments »
June 24th, 2008, 7 Comments »
Something occurred to me the other day: I hardly ever worry about data loss on Capulet’s computers anymore. Why? Despite having no coherent backup plan, 90% of our work is safe. It lives out there, in the magic Internet cloud:
- The majority of our documents are in Google Docs.
- For other documents, we’ve probably emailed them to each other, ourselves or our clients.
- We use Gmail for email.
- We use Blinksale for invoicing, Harvest for time-tracking and Google Calendar for scheduling.
The same goes for the personal side, where 95% of our photos are in Flickr, and all of my MP3s are backed up to MP3Tunes.com. Personal email is on Gmail, too.
I’d like to claim responsibility for this distributed strategy, but it’s totally accidental. The only thing I really worry about is historical data from before, say, 2005. We’ve got an external hard drive for that, but I will eventually back it up to a remote location as well.
It’s a bit ironic that I write this post on the day that our online storage client comes out of the private beta closet.
7 Comments »
May 21st, 2008, 17 Comments »
CNNET News features an article by Tom Krazit today entitled ‘Apple missing golden .Mac opportunity’. Krazit argues that Apple has missed an opportunity with .Mac, and has some suggestions for revamping the service:
For example, if $49 a year granted you access to 20GBs of online storage, unlimited photo sharing on a Web page you designed, and unique capabilities such as Back to My Mac, you might be more willing to pay the equivalent of four bucks a month. Use the same service to link iPhones and iPod Touches with Macs, and you increase the value of each device, while also giving users a reason to buy both their handheld and desk-bound computers from Apple.
Or, Apple could give away a free year of .Mac service with the purchase of a new Mac. That’s the drug-dealer strategy: the first one is free. After that, once you’ve put all your images and videos on the .Mac service, $49 a year won’t seem like much to keep that service running. Apple does provide a 60-day trial period for .Mac services, but that’s not enough to get hooked.
For the uninitiated, a .Mac account costs $99 per year, and gets you the following main benefits:
- Easy posting of photos and videos space on Apple’s servers.
- 10 GB of online storage.
- Virtual access to your Mac from any other Mac.
- Integration with the Apple iLife suite.
Do you have an .Mac account?
I don’t. I can see how it would be convenient, but $10/GB per year always struck me as exorbitant for online backup.
Besides, our requirements for online storage run to, I don’t know, 200 GB. Plus, our 5000-odd photos are already backed up on Flickr and my 8000-odd songs are backed up on MP3Tunes.
I’m still looking for a well-priced, reliable backup option for our Macs. We tried Mozy’s beta program, but it failed miserably.
17 Comments »
March 28th, 2008, 8 Comments »
I did so after reading this scary post from Doc. So if you notice any wacky behaviour around here, please leave a comment or send me an email.
8 Comments »
