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August 8, 2007

internet

New .Mac storage eats disk space for breakfast

Posted Aug. 8, ’07, 9:20 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Internet

MacBook diskHaving parted with $99 every October just to keep using .Mac, I’ve clearly got something invested in the service’s continuing improvement. .Mac email is still my primary address and I use my iDisk every day for storing many of my files so I can easily access them from anywhere. While the service certainly has its fair share of problems—slow performance, for example—it’s still an indispensable part of my workflow.

Yesterday’s improvements are, for the most part, welcome additions. I’ll have to wait until I can snag a copy of iLife ‘08 before I can try out the new web gallery, but I’ve already switched on server side filtering. And more space on the iDisk is never a bad thing, right?

Well, sort of. As much as I appreciate having gigabytes of storage, I’m not about to use my iDisk for my video or music files; it’s just too darn slow for that sort of thing. But it’s fine for text and pictures. This morning, when my Mac informed me that my iDisk would be temporarily unavailable while it was resized, I didn’t really think much about it.

Until I found that I couldn’t download the iWork trial. Now, I’m usually riding on the edge when it comes to disk space: my MacBook has an 80GB hard drive, but I’ve devoted some of that to a Boot Camp partition, and I do store some media on the drive temporarily. But the note about my iDisk resizing came back to me, and I realized with a lurch that because my iDisk is synced, that means that OS X needs to create a 10GB mirror image on my hard disk—and that’s space I can’t really afford to give up (that nifty image above is a graphical representation of files on my hard drive, courtesy of GrandPerspective—that big blue block in the bottom left is my iDisk image).

I could turn iDisk syncing off and just use it as a WebDAV share, but the speed on that is even worse, so for the moment I’m settled on a compromise. If you go to your .Mac account settings on the web (visit mac.com, click on your user name, and then click on Storage Settings), you can allocate your storage between your iDisk and your .Mac Mail. I flipped my Mail up to about 5GB, which should hopefully reclaim at least a few gigs on my hard drive. It’ll do until I can clean some more junk off my hard drive.


6 Comments

Walt said:

Not to trivialize your storage issue, but getting a larger HD installed in a MacBook isn't so much of a hassle these days. At the time a 120GB was the largest notebook size around, I picked one up at a local CompUSA on the cheap at $139 (incl instant rebate), and $29 more got them to install it in my PowerBook for me. I had to initialize and restore of course. I believe the max now is 250GB, so a 120GB would be even cheaper, and would give you a nice increase for that idisk syncing you've got going on, and cost no more than 2 years worth of .Mac. ;-)

August 8, 2007 9:31 AM
Fletcher said:

Wow. That really sucks. It continues the trend of .Mac just seeming to be poorly thought through. Mac OS X runs terribly when disk space runs out including data loss from most applications. This will probably be an unpleasant surprise for anyone with a smaller hard disk.

Apple seems to think people have infinite hard drives. iWork is 2GB (probably more for the new one), iLife is at least 6GB. Add to that a 20GB iTunes library and the normal overhead for Mac OS X (including GBs of printer drivers and language translations).

August 8, 2007 9:51 AM
GetUp said:

" iWork is 2GB (probably more for the new one)"
New iWork'08 is 681 mb installed :)

August 8, 2007 11:45 AM
CellphoneSavant said:

Disappointing. Thanks for the post.

August 8, 2007 12:49 PM
Tim Author Profile Page said:

Wouldn't that 10 GB syncing problem only occur if you actually had 10 gb of data on your iDisk??

August 9, 2007 6:11 AM
Dan Moren Author Profile Page said:

@Tim: Unfortunately, iDisk syncing works by creating a disk image that's the size of your iDisk, regardless of how much data is on there. Otherwise, if it only made it as big as the amount of data you have, there'd be no room to write new data.

August 9, 2007 6:51 AM

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