You've probably already plugged in your digital camera and your digital video-camera and played with the amazing iPhoto and iMovie applications to make professional-quality photo albums or DVDs. Now you Mac is full of your music and priceless family pictures and home movies...are you protected from unforeseen failures?
Your Mac is a reliable collection of Hardware and Software, but over time, components can fail and information could get corrupted. Fortunately, there are a few simple steps you can take to prevent disaster. You can opt for an external hard drive and regularly copy your important files every week. To protect your investment, you better move the hard drive out of your house after you've saved it just in case there's a flood or fire. Alternatively, you can pay for a dedicate web site and upload your data via FTP--file transfer protocol if you're not familiar with it--and then pay your monthly fees and hope that you never forget to back up that latest precious memory. There's a few more alternatives, but these don't seem very, well Mac-like, do they?
Backup to the Rescue
If you don't already have a .Mac account, we're going to convince you to get it for no other reason than to back up your important data. As we discussed above, there are plenty of reasons to back up your data, and it's a standard Information Technology industry practice to store your backups "off-site," out of reach of any disaster that falls on the local hardware. Now let's look only at the Backup features provided with a .Mac account. The free Backup software (
click here to learn more) that you get with your .Mac account provides a simple interface and a reliable scheduling utility to take care of all the dirty details of backing up your data. Once configured using the simple interface, Backup will regularly pop up and backup your data to the location of your choice: your iDisk, another hard drive, or a burnable CD or DVD.
$99? Is it really worth it?
How much do you pay for car insurance? Home or renter's insurance? Life insurance? Think of this as
iLife Insurance. If I were a talking Gecko, I'd say stuff like "that's only, what, 27 cents a day?" or "$8 a month is like an order of fish and chips. But you get more than fish and chips, don't you? You get piece of mind, your own web site, and a few more e-mail accounts wif' a cool
@mac.com address." OK, so I got off track a little there...but I still like
the talking Gecko.
As the gecko said, you do get more than just Backup. You can easily upload photos, movies and audio files to the web and share with your friends and family, build your own web-site or blog for all to read, and read your own e-mail from any computer, anywhere in the world with your own .mac home page where you can use a password to access your e-mail, address book and calendar. There's far too much worth it to describe here, but it is certainly worth one order of fish and chips a month.
Click here for our Top 10 Reasons to Get .Mac
