Alternatively, try...Box
Box (box.net) offers three plans: personal
(free), business ($15 per user per month) and enterprise (pricing on request).
The free account is more generous than Dropbox, giving you 5GB, although it
gets more expensive if you choose to upgrade to the 25GB or 50GB personal
plans, at $9.99 and $19.99 per month - there are no discounts for annual
subscriptions. The free offering limits you to 25MB or less per file; on either
paid level, this is 1GB. (On Dropbox, as long as you don’t exceed your
allocated storage space there’s no file size limit when uploading through the
desktop app and even via the web interface you can upload files as large as
300MB apiece.) A free BoxMounter app can mount your remote Box folder in the
Finder sidebar, where it mimics a local server, like iDisk.
Box.com
Alternatively, try... SugarSync
Like Box, SugarSync (sugarsync.com) offers
a free account that starts out at 5GB. It lets you sync any number of files
across any number of devices, with both web access and dedicated apps for OS X,
iOS, Windows and other mobile devices. A neat Magic Briefcase syncs files across
all devices, but you can choose on a case-by-case basis where other folders are
synced, making SugarSync more configurable than Dropbox. It has excellent
built-in file security, with deleted files stored in a dedicated folder until
you actively remove them from the server, so they’re safe even if removed from
all your client devices. Files in this folder count against your storage, but
if someone shares a folder with you, it doesn’t; nor is there any limit on the
size of individual file you can upload.
SugarSync
Alternatively, try... Microsoft SkyDrive
Microsoft SkyDrive (skydrive.live.com)
offers the most generous free account, at 25GB, and although the maximum
individual file size is 100MB, that’s still more than the free Box option
(25MB). When Windows 8 shipped, the maximum file size will increase to 2GB. To
sync files with your Mac, you’ll need to set up Windows Live Mesh (see
bit.ly/HH3USf), although synchronization has access to only a fifth - 5GB - of
your total SkyDrive space. There’s also an app for iOS. It’s not possible to
upload files using FTP, but you can create Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint
documents directly in your SkyDrive space using Microsoft’s browser-based apps.
A Windows Live ID is required; if you have a Hotmail address or Messenger
account, you’re ready, otherwise it’s free to create.
Microsoft SkyDrive
And the finally...
One last iDisk alternative to consider is
Google Drive. At the time of writing, it was rumoured to be launched by the
time you read this, likely offering Dropbox-like functionality with a 5GB free
account and working on Mac, iOS, Windows and Android. Given the clash with
iCIoud and the fact that Apple isn’t best friends with Google these days, it
seems unlikely the companies will have worked together to achieve seamless OS X
and iOS support, but time will tell...
How to retrieve your iDisk data
As we may have mentioned, MobileMe will
cease to be on 30 June, and along with it every scrap of data you have on your
iDisk. So it’s rather important to download any iDisk data you want to keep
(and don’t already have duplicated elsewhere) before the shutdown.
The easiest way to do this is, if you
haven’t already, to enable synchronization of your iDisk to your Mac. Go to
System Preferences > MobileMe > iDisk and click Start. (You can see this
on p63.) If you have a lot of data on your iDisk, do this last thing at night
so that downloading all the data won’t impact on your regular broadband use.
Once you have your files locally, you can upload them whatever new service you
choose just by dragging them to your synced folder.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to
perform this transfer from one service to another that doesn’t involve copying
all the data on and off your Mac, so you may be looking at a big download and
an equally big and therefore much slower - upload. If you’re broadband tariff
is capped, that could be an issue too. If you want to minimize the impact,
compress your iDisk files first and download them in one lump, rather than
running through the sync operation.
To do this, log in at me.com, select all
the folders you want to download, then click the cog icon and select the
Compress option to zip them into an archive. You can then download this in the
usual way, by selecting it and clicking Download.
If compressing so many files results in a
really humungous large archive, reduce the risk of a failed download by
compressing files in smaller batches.
