My .mac membership will renew in 22 days and and I don’t think I’ll keep it. I don’t need the email or the net storage, and the backup was the only thing I really liked. I’d successfully restored my settings more than once after some mishap. But everything else was either redundant for me or just missing. They kept promising all kinds of cool freebies but nothing showed up for about a year. Liars with pants on fire.
Today my daily backup fired off and crashed with the message that my iDisk was full, which is un-possible because I don’t put anything there. Attempts to find out what were filling the disk failed; it was so slow that I couldn’t even find large files or directory sizes on it without timeouts. Meanwhile the attempt made my entire system grind to a halt; other applications stopped receiving clicks, the screen began to update slowly, the whole overload drill. The logs got spammed up with diskarbitrationd explaining in detail that each application was not responding.
I finally managed to unmount the sonofabitch and ran backup again, and manually removed all my backups. Once again everything ground to a halt, no progress bar, nothing, and I lived by faith as the LORD commands. After about fifteen minutes it suddenly finished and there was all my disk space back.
The backup doesn’t clean up after itself and I see no option to fine tune that. I’m not paying annual rent on something less configurable than a product I can buy. Foo on them.
So that’s it for dot mac.
Be My Blog 
I’ve had .mac for either 2 or 3 years, can’t remember, and usually wonder why I still have it. Perhaps it’s the email — enough people have the address I’d rather not ditch it — but other than that I don’t know. I thought about starting a word of the day blog using iWeb, just to get some use out of .mac, but I can’t even get the RSS feed to show syndicated on LiveJournal, so I scratched that. Oy!
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Rough transcription of my end of the conversation:
Dot mac does WHAT now?
No, I don’t need that.
Yes, I’m sure. I already pay money for those things, and have a much better deal than your offering.
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Re: Rough transcription of my end of the conversation:
also includes the shittiest website creation tools ever seen!
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My version of dot-Mac backups
#!/bin/sh RSYNC=/usr/bin/rsync OPTS="--recursive --size-only --links --times --whole-file --delete --exclude '*/Caches/*' --exclude '*/Data/*'" if [ "$1" == "-v" ]; then OPTS="$OPTS --verbose" fi set -e /usr/bin/osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to mount volume "smb://myusername:mysecretpassword@10.10.10.69/backups"' /usr/bin/hdiutil attach /Volumes/backups/FibonacciBackup.sparseimage -readwrite -quiet echo `date` "Home Dir" cd /Users/brian $RSYNC $OPTS . /Volumes/FibonacciBackup/Users/brian/ # ...etc... /usr/bin/hdiutil detach /Volumes/FibonacciBackup /usr/bin/osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to eject disk "Backups"'Yes, a few of those hard-coded things should probably be made into variables at the top, but this gets the job done. The whole thing is in a crontab for 2am.
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Re: My version of dot-Mac backups
Thanks – I heart sample code. I may buy something or I may do something like that and hook it up to the automounter and anacron so the laptop can handle it.
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I have a friend who keeps complaining about WinXP. I should show him this post.
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I have no idea how to even START my mac.com account after two years of having a mac, and now thanks to you I realize the wisdom of my Ludditery. “It’s not laziness–it’s prescience!”
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