Did you make it on purpose or did you just not realize that it'd be better to backup your stuff on a "different" hard drive?
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Did you make it on purpose or did you just not realize that it'd be better to backup your stuff on a "different" hard drive?
I don't see why people are complaining. My mother pays for Yahoo! Mail just so she can use Mail to check her email and it's like $20-$30. For $70 more you get storage, a website etc. I happily pay $99/year for .Mac just so I will never, ever have to switch all of my email accounts over from my ISP accounts. Gmail is an uber pain with all the advertising too. .Mac rules!
Yahoo gives unlimited storage for free. Just for the reminder a yahoo account implies Calendar, notebook, address book, sync to Outlook and co,Flickr and basically everything you'd want...
Well yeh hopefully Time Machine will be able to back up stuff on a different hard drive... this is my point...because should my main hard drive fail then it would be useless. Not to mention that...Time Machine seems to be the major value of Leopard... cause seriously, apart from graphical updates what's left?
Now well I have a macbook pro and carrying an external hard drive all the time would be a pain ... This is why i'd really want to make the most of iDisk.
But then even though i'd really love to see a major upgrade to .Mac tha would make me pay for the service...I can't help but think that we are all going to be disappointed...Pardon my pessimism, i truly hope I am wrong here
Current user wont be screwed if the make a basic .Mac, with email address and perhaps synching/back to your Mac, free. They'll get the .Mac Pro, with lots of online storage with support for time machines.
Uh, that's like the key feature of Time Machine! You plug in an external hard-drive, Leopard detects it and asks you that "do you want to use this hard-drive for Time Machine backups?". If you have a network-volume you can tell Time machine to back up to that volume. If you have more than one internal HD you can instruct Time Machine to use one of them for backups.
So, you think that Time Machine backs up to the same drive where the data is backing up resides? What would be the point? Time Machine and backups in general are there in case you lose a file or if your hard-drive dies. So OF COURSE it uses a different hard-drive!
Seriously: all it takes is for you to go read about Time Machine on Apple's site. One of the very first things it says is this:
Seriously, it takes one minute to learn this stuff, so you don't have to guess.
Well, besides Time Machine, we have a top-to-bottom 64bit OS (that's pretty big), Quicklook, Spaces (very convenient feature, and one I have been missing), new Finder that sucks less, a whole host of improvements that make the OS snappier... Just about any of those is a major improvement
MBP's have 120GB+ hard-drives, how would you fit all that stuff to iDisk? And it's not like you have to carry an external drive with you all the time. You can just plug it in occasionally for backing up. That's the price of doing backups. Sure you can use online storage for backups as well, but then you can't back up everything.
Firstly, nice post.
Secondly, you're right about the HD thing. I have a Lacie 250GB partitioned in two segments. One is just random space for crap, the other is a complete SuperDuper! clone of my 160GB MacBook HD. If one drive fails, I can boot off the other. Very convenient.
Then I have two other external hard drives. I keep all of my work data backed up on here also. This way, I have 3 backups of my Ph.D work (if I lose it all I would set myself back 6 months).
I have .mac and an iDisk. I use that to sync files between office (iMac) and home/portable (MacBook). I used to have 3 Macs, so iDisk was even more worth it. Now, for mail, calendars and contacts, it seems not great value. Being able to have important pdfs or presentations accessible is a key point though.
lots of things are rare, doesn't mean we should be un-prepared.
and as for idisk: it's quite likely that its a multi TB SAN across hundreds (if not thousands) of disks.
Um so you're telling me that Apple has come up with a feature integrated in the new OS that basically "requires me" to buy an extra hard drive in order to be valuable? So you're telling me that Apple has come up with a semi finished feature...great
Naawww I mean, had the Mac machines been given two distinct hard drives i would have understood but for me it looks a lot like Windows XP restore system introduced..what... 5 years ago at least...
i'm not really convinced about the Spaces. I use Exposé a lot but should I need virtual desktops then then we have different free solutions like VirtueDesktop and co
Anyway, i guess i'll wait two good weeks before buying Leopard... just to see what people really have to say about it. i'm curious about this 64bits OS thing and what it'll really bring
Naawww I mean, had the Mac machines been given two distinct hard drives i would have understood but for me it looks a lot like Windows XP restore system introduced..what... 5 years ago at least...
i'm not really convinced about the Spaces. I use Exposé a lot but should I need virtual desktops then then we have different free solutions like VirtueDesktop and co
Anyway, i guess i'll wait two good weeks before buying Leopard... just to see what people really have to say about it. i'm curious about this 64bits OS thing and what it'll really bring
Let me get this straight: First you complain that Time Machine is useless since it backs up to the same HD the system-data resides on. Then when I tell you that that is not the case, you complain that "it requires me to get a extra hard-drive"? Pray-tell: how should TM work then? Obviously it can't use the internal hard-drive since that can fail. It also can't use external hard-drive since those cost extra. What should it use then? Or should Apple provide you with free external hard-drives so you could use Time Machine? Yeah, Apple should also give it's customers free vidcams and digicams so they could use iMovie and iPhoto....
Like Mac Pro?
Well, not exactly. TM can restore not only individual files, but also the entire system (in case of catastrophic HD failure) and data inside applications (for example: address-book entries).
have you ever actually USED xp's system restore?
it's not a backup solution, its SUPPOSED to allow you to resote the OS and APPLICATIONS to a previous state. problem is, it also treats ANY FILES outside of "My Documents" as fair game. so if you say "restore to date xyz" it will REMOVE any data you have stored outside "My Documents" since that date. AND it doesn't make this "feature" known.
Well I am very surprised that TM is made to run with an external HD...means that I can't "restore" a document when the portable HD is not around, that's why I thought it'd be working with the same HD which, paradoxically is not really safe.
So how it should be working? You mention that the Mac Pro can have several hard drives and this would be perfect then. It would make sense to see other apple computers with two hard drives. I cannot possibly imagine to schedule backups on a laptop as i'll never know when the external HD will be plugged. having an extra internal hard drive would make this process very very smooth
yeh thank you i actually used it...who has not? What do you think TM is apart from restoring documents and content "to a previous state"??? The only difference with TM is that you can choose which item should be restored... well 5 or 6 years after they finally found a way to do that.
Back to .Mac, it would make sense to have a more powerful iDisk as well
.Mac members have Backup 3 which enables them to make incremental backup to the iDisk or to a different drive. TM will provide the backup to a different drive so .Mac members should be able to get more from the iDisk.
By the way something a bit strange here. I have subscribed to .Mac few weeks ago..i couldn't figure out if i really wanted it or not though...so one morning I just bought it on impulse. i downloaded the Backup software. The next days i won a domain name...just adding more confusion ... to my choice. I then canceled my .Mac membership and got reimbursed.
Now the weird thing is that Backup is still fully functional and not limited to 100MB as stated for the free accounts. it just works very well on a different drive. Anyone knows why I don't seem to be limited (not that i'll complain...)
have you ever considered that apple were smart enough to make Time Machine check if the volume is available, and if not, wait till it is?
well given that this is a Mac forum, and as I stated previously, System Restore is ****, I'm generally surprised when people HAVE used it.
and, you missed my point. System Restore points are designed to revert the OS and APPLICATIONS to a previous state. it IGNORES data in "My Documents" but DESTROYS data elsewhere.
System Restore is NOT a backup solution. The only DIFFERENCE with Time Machine? Tell me the damn similarities!
So no matter how it works, it's crap?
Um, it wouldn't really make much sense. It would take too much space, and on laptops it would consume too much power. Point is that TM is there if you want to use it. True, you need extra HD to make backups with it, but you need extra hard-drive even if you use some other solution instead. It's the same with likes of iPhoto: It's there if you want to use it, but you really need a digicam to take advantage of it.
It's not scheduled. It makes the initial backup of the system, and then it backs up as files are changed. If the HD is not plugged in, it does not back up.
Having an extra internal HD is not a viable option for most machines Apple sells at the moment. And fact is that external hard-drives work just fine for this purpose. Hell, that's the way backups SHOULD work. What if your computer was stolen? You would then lose both the system-HD AND the backup-HD that was in the machine. If you used external HD, you could just get a new computer, and restore the system from the external HD.
In short: it makes sense to keep the system and it's backup away from each other. Best case would be that you rotate the backups with at least one backup being stored off-site. You are actually advocating keeping the system and it's backup tied closely together. No, that is madness. Sure, TM would work with such a setup (with Mac Pro for example), but that does not mean that it would be a smart thing to do.
Like I said, TM does other things as well. Can system-restore restore individual entries in address-book? No it can not. It might be able to restore the entire address-book to a previous state, but you can't restore one individual entry in the address-book. System-restore works on files. It can restore files to old versions. TM can do that. But TM can also restore individual items inside that file, and not all of it. And doesn't System Restore only restore the entire system? TM can do that, but it also looks after other content in your machine.
Well, they might provide something along those lines. But iDisk is not an alternative to TM, since it can't back up everything. It simply does not have the room. Maybe they let the user create a "backup-folder" that is synced with .Mac, and they can then put important files there. But that's still not alternative to TM, since TM is meant to work with gigabytes of data, enablind the user to restore everything whereas .Mac-backups would only work with handful of files.
Why pay $99 when you can save $20
Next time buy .Mac from Amazon for $79.99 with FREE SHIPPING!
You get a code in the box that activates or renews 1 year of service. I've had .Mac for 4 years and I only paid full price the first time.
Next time buy .Mac from Amazon for $79.99 with FREE SHIPPING!
You get a code in the box that activates or renews 1 year of service. I've had .Mac for 4 years and I only paid full price the first time.
Here's my story.... I mainly use .mac to host and maintain my website, although I also like having my mac.com email adress as I was lucky to get a good address in the days of iTools.
In my group of friends, I always used to be the only person I know who actually had a website, because it was so easy to maintain with my Mac. I always updated it with photos of birthdays, holidays, weddings etc.
I've been doing this for over 5 years, and it used to be extremely easy with iPhoto and .mac homepage. As soon as I had copied the photos from my camera into iPhoto, I could add a photo album to my website in just a couple of minutes with about 3 clicks.
Apple spoilt this by introducing iWeb and removing the homepage feature from iPhoto. Its now a lot harder to maintain my website and my poor iBook can barely cope with the size of my new site in iWeb (That was never a problem with the incremental page additions using iPhoto/homepage).
My friends (who never used to have websites) now upload their photos to sites like flickr and facebook, and they are able to add tags so other friends can search the photos for people and events. Their free way of sharing photos is better and easier than mine, which I pay for!! They also have unlimited storage.
Apple needs to catch up QUICKLY, and preferably take the lead again with some clever new features, or I will be ditching .mac soon and I'll just use my facebook account to share my photos.
It's not about the money for me, I simply want to have the best possible system. If I have to pay then that's fine, but if something else is better then I will move across. I'll be watching with interest later on.
In my group of friends, I always used to be the only person I know who actually had a website, because it was so easy to maintain with my Mac. I always updated it with photos of birthdays, holidays, weddings etc.
I've been doing this for over 5 years, and it used to be extremely easy with iPhoto and .mac homepage. As soon as I had copied the photos from my camera into iPhoto, I could add a photo album to my website in just a couple of minutes with about 3 clicks.
Apple spoilt this by introducing iWeb and removing the homepage feature from iPhoto. Its now a lot harder to maintain my website and my poor iBook can barely cope with the size of my new site in iWeb (That was never a problem with the incremental page additions using iPhoto/homepage).
My friends (who never used to have websites) now upload their photos to sites like flickr and facebook, and they are able to add tags so other friends can search the photos for people and events. Their free way of sharing photos is better and easier than mine, which I pay for!! They also have unlimited storage.
Apple needs to catch up QUICKLY, and preferably take the lead again with some clever new features, or I will be ditching .mac soon and I'll just use my facebook account to share my photos.
It's not about the money for me, I simply want to have the best possible system. If I have to pay then that's fine, but if something else is better then I will move across. I'll be watching with interest later on.
Thank GOD.
.Mac really needs an update!
If I get this job with Apple, I'm getting .Mac for free.
My free .Mac expires in about two months. It was nice while it lasted (I no longer sell Apple products), even with the update it is not worth the money IMO.
