[JamesG]

Hey Guys!

I'm considering getting a .Mac account to have a personal home page and for back up etc. What are your opinions of this service and is it worth the $99 per year. Also if anyone would like to share their home page address, I'd love to see an example of what is possible.

Thanks,
James

[Paul]

well, I had a nice homepage and stuff... but I needed the room to post this
if you want a good example of what can be done checkout http://homepage.mac.com/steve/

oh, and if you do end up getting it, why not put me in as your referrer? psantora

also I believe you can get the service cheaper by looking on amazon...
and if you know someone who will buy a mac in the near future you could convince them to take advantage of the $30 discount on .Mac when they buy the computer and sell the .mac box to you.

If you use only one or two of the services (just email and the iDisk for example) it may not be worth is as you can get much better service for cheaper (free-see gmail). But if you are looking to take advantage of all that it has to offer (including the free gifts!) then it is a bargain.

[Luca]

It depends. .Mac comes with a lot of extras that not many people find useful, but you might like them. It also provides far less web space than you'd expect given the price - you can get at least twice as much space for less money. On the other hand, it provides you with a very simple, Mac-friendly interface. Uploading stuff is as easy as mounting your iDisk and dragging the files over. With a normal web hosting company, you'd have to use an FTP client to upload files.

Anyway, I remember someone here recommending A Small Orange for hosting. Their 400MB option is $5 a month, which works out to $60 a year. 60% of .mac's price for twice as much storage. But remember - that's just for web hosting. You don't get an email address, iPhoto synchronization, or any special software.

[Moogs]

Sort of a tangent here: Apple has put Virex 7.5.1 onto the server again after the 7.5 version caused all sorts of problems. Anyone tried it yet? When I see Virex 7 updates on MacUpdate, would those also work with 7.5.x?

[torifile]

If you work in multiple locations, it's really nice to have access to your addressbook and bookmarks all the time, even on non-Macs. If you've got multiple Macs you use, iSync is a godsend for keeping them in sync. I've got a Mac in my office, my powerbook and a PocketPC. I can make a change to any of them, sync up and my changes are done everywhere. It's really beautiful. Also it comes with a pretty decent backup program too. I didn't think I'd want to spend the $$ to keep it after the first year, but now I can't do without it.

[naren]

The backup app from .Mac is called Backup, I not even sure it's available anywhere else, but it's awesome. IMHO

[Moogs]

Got the Virex thing working. Seems to take all 7.x updates and is faster than the original variant. Tried some start/stop action and it didn't cause any problem. The exclude list thing is pretty nice, but stupid that it's not GUI-fied. Instead you have to edit a text file and type in the directories manually like the Terminal. Dumb.

[BuonRotto]

It's a rather nice update overall IMO. There are still some weird things like you mention. For some reason it tried using my admin user name and password as my .Mac username and password and it took me forever to figure out why it kept telling me that my .Mac password was wrong. Finally found the culprit under the eUpdate server settings preference. I suppose the Prefs UI is a bit wonky too, but it's easy to understand. The scheduler app is annoying in how you're able to select folders to scan. If you want more than one for a certain scheduled task, you have to select them all at the same time. If you try to add one at a time, it wipes out your earlier selections. Ok, those are all my complaints. Overall, a much better app than 7.2.

[added] one thing IMO they missed, or maybe it's not really feasible: a Virex service.