Steff.me

I don’t know about you but I certainly cannot be bothered to pay out for a service which doesn’t let me do much more than simple, remote backup. The thing about .Mac is that its other features, such as photocasting and publishing with iWeb, are of no real benefit to me whatsoever. Other than the remote backup, which would be nice, there is only one other intriguing notion of .Mac which tempted me to get it. An email address @mac.com - that’s it.

Let’s put aside the nice email address and focus on just the remote backup. There are other ways this can be accomplished without shelling out any money and in my mind, free is always good. One of these, which I have just set up, is with a Box.net account. Box.net is a free provider of online file storage and sharing, which allows you to back up and access documents and files from anywhere.

However, when you just want to access your stuff going through all the rigmorole of accessing the website, having to input your username and password and so forth can just be a tad irritating. If things aren’t simple, I don’t use them! Thankfully, there are some things you can do to make the whole job a little bit nicer. Just like .Mac, you can mount this just like another device and simply drag and drop anything you want backed-up straight to it.

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Before we begin, head over to Box.net and sign up for an account. Now let’s get started.

Go to Finder and press Cmd + K. Input the address https://www.box.net/dav and press Connect.
(Note: I would like to make a point here of saying that the http secure connection does not work for me, I do not know why. If it does not work for you, try putting just “http” unless that bothers you.)

Type in the username (youremail@address.com) and password that you used to sign up for Box.net and you’re done!

Check out your desktop, you should now have a network mount by the name of dav. There’s your stuff!

One last thing, if you want it even easier the next time you want to access your box, create an alias of this connection. Ctrl + Click on the mounted box and select “Make Alias”.

Backing-up files now couldn’t be simpler. If you run out of space or don’t want to store something locally, simply double-click on your aliased connection and once the remote storage is mounted drag anything on to it to instantly back it up.

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I’ve only been using this for a couple of days now but so far it’s been pretty cool. I’d recommend this to anyone who wants .Mac for the backup but just doesn’t want to pay! It doesn’t have the automatic synchronization that .Mac has, but if you’re careful with your files and folders it can be done easily manually. It should also be noted (though this could just be my network connection) it is rather slow; expect Finder to slow right down at first while it is connecting and slightly during transfer. These downfalls are negligable due to the price, I feel, though! I guess Leopard, with Time Machine, is going to make all this a little bit superfluous but it’s always nice to have.