When my MobileMe account came up for renewal, I let it expire. I did not need it. I had found cheaper and better alternatives. When Apple's $99 MobileMe service was released I was quick to register. With MobileMe I could access my mail, contacts, and calendar information in the “cloud” and keep everything in sync across my Macs, my iPod Touch (not iPhone for me as yet), and the web automatically. I could upload my photos to a web gallery…
Time Machine
On August 26 Apple released the latest version of it's MacIntosh operating system, OS X 10.6, code-named Snow Leopard. Some have called it a service pack while other say it is a foundation for something bigger. Whether a service pack or future proof update, the sales figures have Wall Street buzzing causing Apple's share price to soar. Good for my IRA and good for my Mac. But what does Snow Leopard offer and what is in it for you? Read…
Last year my friend had to deliver some distressing news to his wife. The external hard drive on which he had been storing their family photos failed. The problem had started a few weeks earlier when his wife mentioned that the hard drive was making some strange noises. My friend had planned on backing up the disk to DVD but being a busy IT manager he just never got around to it. At that time I remember thinking smugly to…
I think maybe I have a little too much storage space. Between Amazon S3, the two 500GB G-Drive Q external drives and the 500GB Apple Time Capsule, I have over 2TB of storage. I don't think I have that many photo and family videos and my iTunes library isn't that large either. The Amazon S3 is used to backup photos from our iPhoto library stored on the G-Drive Q Media and documents stored on the G-Drive Q. The Time Capsule…
This is a followup to the problems I was having with Time Machine backups to Time Capsule. Time Machine would start preparing a backup and after about 10 would fail. After a few weeks of failed backups or backups taking hours I called Apple support. They had me try several things including reseting Time Capsule. One of the things that we tried was using the Disk Utility to mount the sparse bundle files as a OS X volume. That's when…