.Mac - worth it? (1 Viewer)

[Kyle McKnight]

and now on OSX....that's at 1280x800.

 

[McPaul]

wow you're right, look at all the jaggies under the girl's arm.

I'm not seeing those at all on Mac OS X on either Safari or Firefox.

 

[Aaron Reynolds]

I'm seeing much smoother images than you! That's quite odd. On my older G4 desktop, I'm seeing an unresized 800x600 image, and on my wife's MacBook it's sized down because of the smaller screen size it's sized down, but still looks smooth. I'll see if I can make a screenshot tonight.

 

[DaveF]

Freakin .Mac backup system! Almost makes a guy want to go back to Windows! At least then I knew what I was in for.

I've spent 36 hours trying to get the .Mac backup system to work on my wife's computer, to no avail. She's selected 5GB of files to backup; she's got 9+ GB free on her .Mac account, and her hard-drive has 35+ GB free. The Backup app issues failure errors every couple hours, with no explanation or indication what the errors were. We hit "retry" only to see it fail again the next day. This morning, after letting run overnight, found that it had wholly failed and deleted all data it had previously uploaded. The console log had a cryptic error about POSIX system out of hard-drive space. How can I be out of space when her .Mac account has 2x the space we need?

We'll try again this weekend. When Apple does something right, they get superb quality. But when they bumble it, they produce software too simplified to properly troubleshoot. And because their software is so "good", they don't bother to document it adequately!

Anyone use .Mac backup successfully? Any tricks?

 

[Oren]

With the increased capacity, I tried to similarly ramp up the amount I back up. It seemed to complete, but then immediately restarted the backup procedure, at which point I canceled it. I intend to try again, but I'm in the midst of migrating my .Mac website to being hosted directly by my domain registrar.

With the new personal domain feature, it is possible to host a site on .Mac, without simply redirecting to it or masking it. It's a big step forward. But given the nominal increase in cost, I decided to opt for true hosting, which also got me 50 email addresses.

I lost the ability to easily have password protected sites, but I think I can do the same using .htaccess, once I figure it out.

At the moment, I plan to still use iWeb to develop the site, and then use Cyberduck to keep the folder on my hard drive in sync with the one on the hosting site. (In theory - I haven't tried this yet.) Not quite as easy as simply pressing "publish" but not too difficult either. I may someday step up to something like Freeway, but after playing with it a bit I was still lost.

 

[Craig S]

Your .Mac space is partitioned - some is allocated to mail, and the rest to general use (including backup). You might want to go check this split - I'm not sure but it may default to 50/50. You can change the split to meet your needs better.

 

[Aaron Reynolds]

In addition to Craig's note (which you can change by logging into Mac.com and clicking on your little silhouette to get your account info), I heard something the other day about issues with backing up a very large amount at one time. I will get some clarification on what exactly the issue is and let you know, but in the meantime you may want to break up the backup into individual items on slightly different schedules and see if that solves the problem. For instance, back up the photos separately from the documents, and so on -- create lots of small plans instead of one big plan.

Also, if you haven't tried it, I love the quick picks like "find every Word document in my Home folder and back it up".

I made the transition to a personal domain with .Mac with only a couple of small hiccups, which I'll detail in the iLife thread (which I think was where I was talking about it before) when I get a chance. Short version: if you're starting from scratch with a new domain, it's easy as pie. If you've already got the domain and are actively using it, talk to your current host about side-effects.

 

[DaveF]

Oren, what you're doing for your website should work fine: publish from iWeb and upload with Cyberduck (or other FTP client). I tried to talk my wife into this, but nothing doin'

Craig, thanks for the tip. I'll double check.

 

[Oren]

The side effect I encountered was that I could change the cname for www.domain.com, but not domain.com because changing it for domain.com would mess up the email hosted by the domain registrar.

So, either way, the displayed content would be exactly the same (since they would both point to .Mac), but going to domain.com would cause only domain.com to be displayed in the URL (due to forwarding with masking).

 

[Oren]

OK, so I tried again. First, i read somewhere that someone fixed the problem by deleting everything in ~/Llibrary/Application Support/Backup/. But after doing that and starting another big backup, I had the same experience - it would keep restarting.

Yeah, well, that's because it wasn't actually restarting. I opened up my iDisk in the Finder, and discovered that Backup was breaking up large backups into parts, roughly 90MB each. Each part was displayed in Backup as if the backup process was restarting. D'oh.

Once again, user error. Damn you, Macintosh! One day I WILL find your flaw!

 

[skellener]

Dot Mac is fine for a new user just starting out. However as great as 10GB for $99 seems these days, head over to globat.com and get 1000GB for about $54 a year (with your own domain and unlimited email addresses).

 

[DaveF]

1TB for $4/mo! Good gravy! I'm paying $3/mo for 10GB at GoDaddy, and that was a good price just a few months ago. (shakes head) This defies my sounds-too-good-to-be-true bearings.

 

[Aaron Reynolds]

And how easy is it to post a .Mac Web Gallery to Globat.com? Or to sync your data between machines automatically? Or to one-click publish from iWeb?

Clearly, .Mac is not about the dollar-per-gig ratio -- it's about ease of use with the included software.

I had some friends who ran a hosting company who tried to build a package for me that would do what .Mac does, better and for less money. The web pages looked far less good and the time to put things together was much longer -- the only thing I did was save money.

.Mac is far from perfect, but evaluating it purely as hosting or storage is silly, because that's not what it is. It's like evaluating a 17" MacBook Pro on it's weight alone.

 

[DaveF]

.Mac is an interesting beast. It seems great if you want a quasi-personalized email, or modest backup, an easy webpage, or some nice photo galleries. But as soon as you want to move past that, there's a hard ceiling with no room to grow.

It's also a bit unsettling, how .Mac becomes more scattered and less cohesive, as it matures. My wife complains that the former web pages system is wholly unshared with the iWeb-driven web pages. And I think the iWeb created photo galleries are unrelated to the new iPhoto-driven galleries.

None of these are reasons to not get .Mac. But it feels like a sloppy system, hastily assembled. And some of the software tools reflect that: I hope to fight with the backup software some more this weekend on my wife's computer. I spent three days on it a while back and it chronically crashed with useless, inexplicable error messages. The software looks great and promises an idiot-proof backup tool. But I've found it nothing but pain.

My wife is 90% pleased with iWeb and she won't get rid of her .mac email address. I hope the backup tool will work. Those will readily justify the $99/yr for her. But I can still wish for a more coherent, more mature, and less costly product.

 

[Aaron Reynolds]

.Mac web galleries are neat and aren't immediately part of iWeb -- but if you publish one, you'll notice that in the Web Widgets tool at the bottom of iWeb that you can now embed that gallery in an iWeb page, complete with skimmability.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

As I noted before, I only use .MAC to synch my desktop and laptop.
Beyond that I have no use for it. Still, what am I going to do? I
think this service is overpriced by $50-$60 a year.

 

[Ted Todorov]

And no one mentioned iDisk (other than with Backup)-- anyone with a good internet connection can have a "disk" on .Mac always mounted on their machine, that behaves exactly like a local external drive. This is invaluable if working on a collaborative project with someone or need many times a day off-sight backup for some precious piece of work. I also really appreciate the IMAP e-mail -- where I can have multiple computers (four of them) synched locally with several years worth of e-mail.

 

[DaveF]

Ron,
A good syncing tool is worth its weight in gold. I spent several years in grad school manually syncing home and school PC via sneakerneted Zip Disk. I never could find a good sync program to solve that problem. If I were a student today, I bet that feature would justify a Mac and .Mac.

Ted,
The new .Mac SPAM filter system plus IMAP interface could now make it a better iPhone intermediary that gMail. But it depends wholly on how good the .Mac spam filtering is. What's your experience.

For me: if .Mac had 30 GB for $99 and it was $10 / 10 GB addtional storage, I'd subscribe just for the backup system (assuming I can figure it out). The photo galleries, I would play with if I had them.

 

[skellener]

I use Rapidweaver (realmacsoftware.com) for website stuff. It's as easy if not easier than iWeb or iPhoto. Works with all the iLife apps. Sync what between what machines? I have one Mac. If I want I can FTP into my account using Transmit (panic.com). I am not stuck with slow, unreliable WebDAV that would always lock up my Finder. FTP definitely seems much faster. I can create some space and FTP account for any of my friends that want some space. I have my own domain. I can give any of my friends an email address if they like. I can host other domains with my account (there's so much space) for $15 year. It's always up. When I had Dot Mac for the first couple of years it was down all the time. Don't even get me started on that disaster called "BackUp". Never worked for me. There's no way I could ever trust it. Want real back up? Get SuperDuper (shirt-pocket.com) and back up to a firewire drive. I applaud Apple for packaging many tools in one nifty package. I just think they don't work very well.

But please, use Dot Mac if you like.

 

[Aaron Reynolds]

Steve, I've been down the routes you describe. I thought the alternates I was using were good and easy, but they're not as easy as .Mac.

What kind of issues were you having with Backup? (Not disputing -- rather looking to find the source and maybe solution to the problem.)

Nothing works for me anywhere near as easily as .Mac and Web Galleries out of iPhoto -- and really, I can't imagine any non-integrated solution that can do what it does.

I'm not suggesting that it's right for you, Steve -- I was just taking issue with your characterization of it for someone who is just starting out. I had it, walked away from it and returned to find it infinitely better. I'm not a beginner at this stuff, I'm just interested in saving my own time, especially when it comes to photo sharing with friends and family.