Do You Have a .Mac Account?

May 21st, 2008, 16 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.

16 Comments »

I Tried Mozy, and It Failed Me Twice

December 19th, 2007, 9 Comments »

Living abroad, we’ve been a little irresponsible about backups. We have a portable hard drive, but it’s pretty full, and it’s in the same room as our computers. After reading Anil Dash’s glowing report on the online backup service Mozy, we decided to give it a try.

What a disaster.

I’ll spare you all of the boring details, but their Apple client is in beta, and clearly deserves a downgrade to alpha. Despite a responsive and reasonably helpful support department, I could never get it working on my MacBook. Julie faired a little better, but the client spontaneously stopped working on her MacBook after a few days.

The support dried up a week ago, and today I got a message asking that I call their support line. I’ve already spent way more time than I should need to on troubleshooting the software, so I’m done. I’ve requested a refund.

We paid US $207.90 for unlimited backup of two computers for two years. That seemed like a good deal, so I’m in the market for something at a similar price point and pain-free on the Mac OS. Do you have any suggestions?

.Mac is out, because we have about 200 GB to store, not 10. Plus it would cost almost twice as much. Lastly, we’re not on OS 10.5.

UPDATE: I see I’m not alone in my frustrations with Mozy or the lack of Apple options .

9 Comments »