Route 19

I signed up for .Mac service for the most part to take advantage of the seamless integration for a number of my “needs”… scheduled backup, synchronization between 3 Macs, publicly shared folders and photos. It all worked relatively well until recently, when synchronization began to randomly delete items and I was running out of disk space.

Slowly I began to migrate to alternatives.

Gallery to Picasaweb
First it was exporting my iPhotos to Picasaweb. Their new Picasa for Mac is a UI disaster, but the iPhoto plugin for exporting to Picasa works great. Picasaweb isn’t as pretty as the .Mac Gallery, but it does the job and you get 1Gb free.

Sync to Fruux
Then I discovered Fruux, a straight-forward synchronization tool that has worked great even in it’s beta release. Currently it syncs bookmarks, calendars and the address book. Also free.

iDisk to Dropbox
Dropbox allowed me to replace iDisk’s public folders with another no-nonsense, easy to use alternative. 2Gb free space, and many times faster than the clumsy iDisk.

Backup to Time Machine
To replace the great Backup app I’ve turned to Time Machine and an external 250Gb USB 2.0 hard drive, which cost me a little less than the MobileMe renewal price.

Calendar to Google Apps
I never made much use of .Mac’s webmail or online calendar, mostly because I use Google Apps for webmail and with my iCal sync’d across all Macs it’s usually close by. I would love it if Google Apps was able to seamlessly sync contacts and calendars with my Macs as well as Fruux is handling it, but I’ve yet to find an easy, hands-off solution for this.

I’ve replaced the .Mac/MobileMe services I actually used and added more capacity, for less than the cost of a 1 year subscription.