I went to Mac World today and there were two products that left me very impressed. One of them was Dolly Drive. They’re an app that makes their cloud storage look like a valid Time Machine drive. You use time Machine just as you always have, but your data is securely copied up to the cloud.
The first thing that impressed me was how easy it was to use. Subscribe to their service on their website, download and start their app, and voila! You can select their virtual drive in Time Machine.
If you are thinking “but I want a local copy,” you should know that they do both. In addition to creating the copy in the cloud, they create a local, bootable copy on a hard drive you specify. (Time Machine doesn’t create bootable backups, but they do.)
The service is $10/mth for 250 GB, and your capacity increases with time while your price stays the same. (I’m not sure of the details there; you can read them on his site.)
One thing I thought was really cool is that they will allow you to send them your current Time Machine backup to seed your first backup — for free. This service more than makes up for the fact that they’re twice the price of similar services (Mozy, Carbonite, Crash-Plan). It’s also nice that the whole thing feels very Mac-native. Some apps I have played with on the Mac are barely functional, let alone Mac-like.
That’s all I’ve got to say about that. If you’re curious about the other things that impressed me at Mac World, here is a brief list:
1. Topaz Suite – Extremely impressive photo and video munging software ($400 normally, $150 at the show)
2. GlobalDelight.com sells boom, a MacOS app that makes the built-in speakers in your Mac much louder ($5)
3. Kanex – a mini-port to HDMI adapter with sound
Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at Sullivan Strickler, which helps companies manage their legacy data
