As a follow up to my previous post, you may have noticed from the Mac OS X screenie that my Windows Hard Disk is very small – 30Gb with just 19Gb free. Well it’s even smaller now (9Gb)!
I chose such a small amount, thinking I wouldn’t need that much space as I survived for long enough on my PC with 40Gb (i added a second hard drive later but hardly had anything on it) but of course I’ve been proved wrong. I;ve put alot of games on there already, but seeing as they’re older, they also take up less disk space. Modern games like Supreme Commander on the other hand, takes up a whopping 8Gb of space! I’ve installed it and hardly played it yet, sigh.
So, in a very round about way, here is today’s topic – disk space, or more accurately, disk space for backups. I have never backed up my old PCs, I treated them like testing grounds for all kinds of demos and beta applications, and when things went wrong I jut wiped everything and started over. There was never really anything important on my PC. However, my wipe and restart approach came back to haunt me last year when I lost all the work i’d done on our family tree – I have to start from the beginning again when I can muster the energy!
Now I have Mac, and i’m filling it up with pictures and music and home movies, i’m growing concerned about losing it all if my hard drive dies. So it’s time to think about backing up. What acually got me thinking about this was an article in MacFormat about backing up online for free. By signing up with Mediamax.com you get 25Gb free online storage. – an outstanding amount compared to various other providers i’ve looked at (iBackup, XDrive, Boxstr etc).
All is not rosy however – I followed the tutorial in the magazine, signed up and created an Automator action to regularly upload files to Mediamax by FTP (Oh how I love Automator!!). I then tested it and discovered it didn’t work. After re-reading the tutorial many times, recreating the Automator action and double-checking my account details on Mediamax, I posted on the MacFormat forum and discovered what was wrong: Mediamax have stopped their FTP service while it is being upgraded.
You can upload files via their website but it takes ages and it’s not resumable like FTP is supposed to be, so if the website crashes or you accidentally close the browser window, the upload is cancelled. Oh and their desktop upload application is not yet Mac compatible.
Anyway I as prepared to live with browser uploads until FTP was reintroduced, but then I discovered another little snag – the free account only allows you to upload files with a maximum size of 10Mb.Now for a word document, 10Mb is quite large, but consider music, pictures, movies etc and it’s not actually alot. What’s the point of giving you 25Gb of free space if you can’t put your large files (ie, the reason you need the 25Gb) on it? Mediamax do offer more space/upload allowance if you subscribe, but I don’t really want another monthly Direct Debit.
So I started considering other options, seeing as I only went with Mediamax based on the magazine article. THat’s when I discovered that alot of other companies only offer free space of 2Gb, 4Gb or 6Gb on average. Out of the many I looked at, most were either unfriendly for Mac users or didn’t support FTP – and besides, I think i’ll fill up 6Gb quickly.
But there is an alternative – Apple’s own solution: .Mac (dotMac). It’s a subscription based service – £69 a year – and gives you a virtual hard disk (your iDisk) of 12Gb which you can browse just like a regular Mac disk in Finder. You also get your own @mac.com email address and various other iLife integrations for sharing photos and videos and making websites – stuff you can already do with the likes of Blogger etc, and stuff i’m not interested in.
Now £69 is alot of money, and 12Gb is not very large. This brings me back to my small Windows hard disk – Ideally i’d like to have another hard drive so that I have more space and so far the value for money seems alot better than .Mac.
Consider this – I buy .Mac for £69, sure I might use the iLife features and I could tell everyone my @mac.com email address (and it would look good on my CV!), but as I only need backup space at the moment (I haven’t fully used all the iLife apps on my Mac yet anyway and i’m happy using Hotmail through Mail) i’d be paying £69 for a 12Gb virtual hard disk.
For £69 I could get a La Cie external hard drive of 250Gb storage! They come as USB 2.0 or Firewire connectable (or both for a higher price) and they even have ones shaped like Lego bricks!lol I could then partition that drive and give some space to Mac OS X for backups, and some to Windows for more games.
The disadvantage is that it’s another thing on my desk (I hate clutter) and if my house burns down my data is lost, whereas as an Apple iDisk takes up none of my real world space and is theoretically always safe.
Of course, £69 is still quite a chunk of money – since I got this Mac all I seem to be doing is throwing money at it!=S – and there are cheaper external hard drives. I’m still shopping around but I think I need 200Gb minimum (there’s no point buying say a 50Gb hard drive only to fill it up and have to buy another) and from a purely aesthetic perspective, I want a hard drive that compliments my Mac, not an ugly grey brick, lol.
Decisions, decisions…I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Post Script -
I’ve discovered I can customise the buttons on my Mighty Mouse (yes, that’s what it’s called), so instead of holding Ctrl to right-click, I can assign that side of the mouse for right-clicking. I’ve changed it back though as I’ve actually gotten used to Ctrl-clicking and sometimes I would mistakenly right-click when I wanted to left-click. It works like a regular two-button mouse in Windows anyway.
