Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Data caps can have serious consequences for online backup. If you
want to use CrashPlan, for example, to store the entire contents
of your 1 TB disk online but your monthly data cap is only 250 GB,
you can see how that's a problem waiting to happen. (I offer some
suggestions for dealing with this issue in
CrashPlan Tips
, later.)
Tip:
To discover exactly how much data you're sending and receiving
over your broadband connection, and what your cumulative total is
for the month, try the $7.99 app
NetUse Traffic Monitor
.
•
Cloud-to-cloud backup options increase.
More and more
people store their most important data in the cloud already—
whether that's email on an IMAP server, documents in Dropbox,
or music on Amazon Cloud Drive. So several new services have
appeared that let you back up data from one cloud-based provider
to another, without having to download it to your Mac first. You
can read more about this in
Back Up Data from the Cloud
.
•
iDisk R.I.P.
Apple discontinued MobileMe at the end of June
2012. Although some parts of MobileMe are still around as part
of iCloud, iDisk isn't one of them.
•
Time Machine backups to the cloud disappear.
DollyDrive
started by offering cloud-based destinations for Time Machine.
Although DollyDrive is still around (and, indeed, much improved
from its early days), it no longer relies on Time Machine. That's
probably for the best; Time Machine and cloud storage were never
a great match.
Software Continues Its Evolution
The pace at which new backup software appears has slowed, but rarely
does a week go by without updates to at least a few of the 100-plus Mac
backup programs. A notable player is Retrospect, which went through
a series of owners before coming under the control of Retrospect, Inc.,
a company created by former members of the Retrospect development
team. Since then, the company has released Retrospect 9 (in 2011) and
