I use gmail and google calendar and they're sync on my ical and mail application ical on my iphone and mac. No crapy web apps here. It's actually really easy to set up....
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First Look Video of iCloud.com Beta
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I use gmail and google calendar and they're sync on my ical and mail application ical on my iphone and mac. No crapy web apps here. It's actually really easy to set up....
Hmm I was under the impression that you just have to pay the price for not having music through iTunes but that was it since it was not actually syncing your iTunes but just matching it with what iTunes already has. Is that not right? If that is not right does that mean if you want to sync over 5 gigs of music you will get charged for space and because it is not from iTunes? That would end up being a really bad option for music. I mean google music is totally free right now and only downfall I see is upload times with a lot of music. 
What if your home gets burglarized and they steal your computer and backup drive? What if your home gets hit by fire/flood/tornado and your computer and backup drive are destroyed? I have priceless (to me) and, in some cases, irreplaceable content on my computer. $100 per year to back all of it up in the cloud seems like a reasonably priced insurance policy. True, you can keep a hard-drive backup at another location, but bringing it back and forth to and from the offsite location is a hassle.
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That's why you use off site servers.
I have one at work and one at home that I use for media.
Other services are also available at a cheaper rate if you want to go that route.
Not quite; allow me to clarify. Dropbox gives you 2GB free up front. You can earn additional storage of up to 8GB (not 16GB) by referring people, who must then sign up. For that you get an extra 250MB of storage each. So you would have to have 32 people you referred sign up to get an additional 8GB of storage. Not an easy task.
While Apple doesn't have a referral system, their storage is cheaper. For 50GB more of storage, it'll cost you $120 a year on Dropbox; Apple charges $100. Plus, you can't use Dropbox for iCloud.
I love Dropbox and will continue to use it, as I share files on it, sync 1Password with it and have many files handy where I can access from any device, anywhere. I'll use Apple's storage for iCloud only. (I tried using iDisk and found it kludgy.)
Exactly. I've found Amazon's S3 storage to be dirt cheap. You only pay for what you use, as opposed to buying a set amount of storage. For the first 1TB of standard storage, you pay $0.14 per GB per month. For "Reduced Redundancy Storage," you pay $.093 per GB per month. (See Amazon S3 Pricing.) So, for 50 GB, that'll cost you $84 per year for standard storage, or $60 for RRS. You can get 5GB free upon signing up, but that's only good for a year. BUt keep in mind, you only pay for what you actually use. S3 is no substitute for the nifty Dropbox or Box functions, nor iCloud servers, but for good old fashioned data backup, it's great.
Very well put, @uhmorphous, for this civil indecency and a nice explanation too.
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Here's how to fix the address book appearance: http://www.cultofmac.com/how-to-give-address-book-a-clean-and-simple-look-in-lion/106760
Good job with a very clear differentiation of these services, but please, please, don't mention iDisk again. It makes my stomach ache.
But its $100 for 50 GB. I don't know about you, but 50 GB is about 1/10 of the minimum amount of stuff I need backed up, which is roughly 500GB, but really a full back up of everything (meaning compressed videos and full res, etc) its getting close to 1TB and probably in a year or two it will be 2TB. If the linear pricing continues, I'm looking at $2-4K a year on iCloud. For that much money, its pretty easy to bring my MBP to work every once in a while and create another back up on a personal drive there. Or, I could just create an FTP there and have everything put on my personal drive, my work is not one to care about such usage of their network. I also tend share much of the most important media with family and friends. So, if I wanted to be extra safe, I could just keep a back up at my parents house, much of which they'd want anyway.
There is just no way the PC is going away, per Jobs' vision, if we can't get MUCH cheaper cloud storage. I'm talking at least an order of magnitude, maybe 2, or even 3, as people become increasingly reliant on digital, as opposed to optical, storage of HD and 3D movies, TV shows and family videos.
Its a nice step to keep all your music, or at least a sizable portion of it, synced and available via the cloud I guess, but if that's all its really good for, then its just not worth $100/year to me. But maybe that's just me.
With all due respect how much bandwidth do you have available to even be considering a cloud-based backup for multiple terrabytes of data? Not just for the initial upload but for retrieving it for actual use? A quick calculation on the the current mid range package for cable broadband in the UK (30Mb down, 1Mb up) gives over 100 DAYS to upload 1Tb of data. And that's assuming you don't run into any traffic management, which you will, and that nothing else is using your pipe in the meantime.
Ultimately storage capacity on-line will increase in-line with bandwidth costs. Anyone looking for terrabytes now and expecting it to be £100 a year or less isn't even within touching distance of reality. If you need that sort of backup capacity now, get an external drive and take it with you if you really must have it off-site. In a few years, as hundred meg+ broadband becomes more common, then these services will become cheaper.
Let's not forget as well iCloud isn't intended as an all-purpose backup. Your data allowance is only for mail, documents, camera roll, settings, account info and app data. If you've got terrabytes of music then pay for match (if you're in the US) and it all becomes 'purchased' music which you then don't have to pay anything to store as it's all on Apple's servers anyway.
haha, that stuff would most likely NEVER happen.
Why stop there? What if you're abducted by pirates and they steal all your pirated material on your hardd rives? What if your hard drives grow legs and walk out the house and steal your car never to be seen again?
Unfortunately, I don't have a problem with how the address book looks rather than its interface in how you peruse through it to find a contact. A theme won't help it here.
The old way was much quicker to get what you need if you wanted to search by category at least. No having to have it change pages just to get to the category list.
iCloud....Maybe
Not having to store your purchased content (movies, music, books) on your own hard drive is a plus.
What I will NEVER make available to the "cloud" is personal info (movies, photos, financial, private music (my band), etc.)
My biggest fear.....I sign up for iCloud for purchased content but my whole hard disk gets "inadvertantly" raided/backed up "by mistake" to the cloud....and then "sorry, the server farm has been hacked".
This will be a balancing act between personal privacy and convenient access to your purchased media.
Not having to store your purchased content (movies, music, books) on your own hard drive is a plus.
What I will NEVER make available to the "cloud" is personal info (movies, photos, financial, private music (my band), etc.)
My biggest fear.....I sign up for iCloud for purchased content but my whole hard disk gets "inadvertantly" raided/backed up "by mistake" to the cloud....and then "sorry, the server farm has been hacked".
This will be a balancing act between personal privacy and convenient access to your purchased media.
There are a few people in Japan who might disagree with you.
Or Joplin, MO; or Memphis, TN; or tons of other places around the world.
I don't get something
If there's no iDisk functionality, in other words no 'hard drive in the sky', then how on earth does one fill up 50gb? With all the things that don't count toward the limit, I just don't get what we are meant to do with all this space
Or is there going to be a "one more thing" perhaps...
If there's no iDisk functionality, in other words no 'hard drive in the sky', then how on earth does one fill up 50gb? With all the things that don't count toward the limit, I just don't get what we are meant to do with all this space
Or is there going to be a "one more thing" perhaps...
I think you missed an order of magnitude. 1Tb/1Mbs = 1,000,000 seconds/[60*60*24] = 11.5 days. I get up to 10Mb/s upload, usually around 5-8. I've moved data for work on that order of magnitude (regularly moving 100s of Gigs) and its usually an over night thing, 24 hours at most. I've also never had an interruption that caused the upload or download to terminate. And I don't have a particularly great connection for my area. Then, even if a complete back up takes a couple days, so what? That's a one time thing, then outside of the rare day I do something that might add 10s of gigs, it really wouldn't be a big deal at all.
And why would something like 1Tb of online storage have to cost more than around $100/year? You can buy internal 1 or 2 Tb drives for less than that. I understand having redundancy and operational costs, but large companies like Apple or Amazon should be able to buy hard drives at closer to cost than you or me. Plus they should have sufficient volume that operational costs are minimal to any individual costumer. And I'm not necessarily expecting this TODAY, but simply pointing out that this is what its going to take to get rid of PCs. And for all apple's pushing that direction, we are still apparently very far away from that with these prices.
I do see a day without a PC, where we walk around with little more than the display and interface and have the power of Amazon EC2 (or by then much more) at our finger tips. And I do see that this might be all they can do for now. But that doesn't prevent it from being able to serve more than a niche market. It will serve some people, but I don't expect it to really take off until pricing drops quite a lot.
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No, who actually listens to 110 GB of music?
That's like music hoarding. I've been pretty discerning about my music collection for the past 13 years and I have 10 GB when all is said and done.
Ok I don't get this..$40 a year for 20 GB of space?
LOL!!..Microsoft Sky Drive offers 25 GB FREE! Plus 5 GB for email, calendar, and photos.
Already syncs with notes, email, photos, calendar, Office. I don't see what is innovative here. You guys are getting ripped off totally.
LOL!!..Microsoft Sky Drive offers 25 GB FREE! Plus 5 GB for email, calendar, and photos.
Already syncs with notes, email, photos, calendar, Office. I don't see what is innovative here. You guys are getting ripped off totally.
Pricey?
This seems to be kind of pricey, doesn't it? I mean $2 per GB? Not to spoil the fun, but Amazon's cloud storage is a $1 per GB. Have to see how this plays out, but for a lot of stuff, I just prefer to use Evernote (I realize this is for a slightly different purpose).
This seems to be kind of pricey, doesn't it? I mean $2 per GB? Not to spoil the fun, but Amazon's cloud storage is a $1 per GB. Have to see how this plays out, but for a lot of stuff, I just prefer to use Evernote (I realize this is for a slightly different purpose).
Some people like a large variety of music, and their mood can change from one day to another. I have about 30GB of music and another 20 GB of audiobooks in my iTunes library. I keep an iPod Classic as my "car drive". I can listen to anything I own in the car on a whim that way. Sure there's probably 10-15 albums that get way more play than anything else, but I never know when I'm going to want to put something on that I haven't really listened to in 10 years.
My home server's "music" directory is 429.3 GB of compressed, lossless music. That's about 1500 CDs that have been ripped and saved - and the CDs are stored in the garage in case I need to re-rip to a new format in the future. (Nothing in my library is horribly over-compressed downloaded crap, only lossless CD rips.)
I keep a 500 GB portable USB drive up-to-date with a copy, so that when traveling I have the full library available on my laptop.
As DirtySocks said, I'd rather not guess what subset of my library I want on any day. Sometimes I'll want baroque, sometimes rock, sometimes jazz - and sometimes I just want to do the time warp again (and I can choose between the London stage version or the film version).
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Some people need much more than 10GB just to cover the works of a single composer, and that's before we even get into the idea of having multiple recordings of different pieces of classical music. A Bach box set can easily comprise 100CDs for example, and of course we have to remember some people are not comfortable having their entire music library compressed to MP3/AAC.
When you decide how much storage space people should require for music based on your own standards then you come off as pretty narrow minded.