.Mac is worth the $100 dollars you pay for it per year.

For some, it might be. I won't be renewing at that price. Maybe at $25/year I'd consider it.

It is to me now as nowhere else can I get a webdav server with 1GB space for £63 a year. (free to me anyway as dad pays for it :cool: )

Only problem is lack of .htaccess editing and no mysql. :mad:

Backup 3 is awesome though, best backup util I've used so imo.

mod_dav in your own apache server... that's as much as your hard drive can give and the only cost is electricity for having your system up.

As for .Mac, most of those services (except probably the .mac e-mail account) can be done at home at no cost except the fun of duplicating the server side.

R.

I was recently checking a large e-mailing list for currency and 10% of a broadcast message to the list bounced. Almost every bounce was from an xxxx@mac.com mailing address. A lot of folks seem to have voted with their credit cards.

The drain on my bandwidth when I'm accessing it from college costs me, means I can't transfer stuff as fast as I can with it on my iDisk (college download > home upload)

So for me .Mac makes sense. Plus with one click publishing, etc, and the ease of which backup 3 allows me to back data up to the iDisk, I am once again a .Mac subscriber.

To the mailing list comment, they could have been temporary .Mac accounts created, you can't say for definite that they are all people who haven't renewed (plus .mac hasn't renewed yet afaik)

Given the dates of last contact on many of them, I suspect they were accounts opened when (after a system upgrade, for example) they were free and then not continued when the $99 bucks came due.

I've never figured the appeal of .mac.

The backup space isn't big enough for me, and a second hard drive that is big enough costs less than $99 and is easy to install.

gMail suits me fine (aside from my ISP accounts) and is free. I don't use it for anything I don't want searched, but they permit huge attachments which is handy.

Running a little family site is a piece of cake with the built-in Apache server, and all it takes is a little tweaking of your router to get connected. True, ISPs don't like servers on their net, but mine doesn't care as long as the traffic isn't high and for my purposes, it isn't.

I don't need the eye candy, and have never had a problem with a virus.

What am I missing?

The backup only has value for being off-site. The advantages being protection from a total wipeout of your system by some disaster or theft, and access to your data remotely. I carry a laptop so I'm almost never without my data, but some people don't.

Mail account...yawn. Certainly no real value in that.

I haven't spent time figuring out easy photo publishing using .Mac. I still use my own hosted server space, because I can drag/drop a photo onto the Transit widget, and have it put there automatically, then I use a macro to paste the URL. I haven't seen a way to quickly and easily publish a photo from the Finder to .Mac. Didn't research it heavily though.

Now, what's this about 1GB? Did they raise the limit and I don't know?

How can you not have heard?

Its like one of the biggest pieces of news to come out of expo paris (which isn't very big ;))

Just goto http://www.mac.com/ and read...

I stand corrected, this is a point for .Mac, but I don't have such a fast connection and I have never had problems uploading something to my own server.

This I don't understand, all these services you can have on your own server without that much work.

Another thing that I don't understand from .Mac is that the authentication is made over SSL but the actual data when uploading to iDisk is made over webdav on the clear!. Can anyone confirm this or is it just me experiencing this?

R.

People have been asking for this for a long time, I guess Apple chose Paris as a good place to surrender to them... :D :D