Internet backups for my Mac

I've been thinking it really is time to do something about backing up my main home machine more effectively.

I have an aging PowerMac G5 which works great. So I'm looking for something that plays well with Mac OS/X.

Once upon a time, I used to do regular backups by burning DVDs. I'd then collect these up and put them in our storeroom. This is far enough from our apartment that it would take a pretty major disaster to make them unavailable.

Now that Time Machine has come along, I've become lazy about backups. Time Machine does a great job, restores actually work, and it seems to have no noticeable performance impact. The problem is that the backups are not offsite, so while it's a great solution to accidental deletion or a hard drive failure, it's not a solution to a bigger disaster like the building burning down.

What do do?

It seems obvious to me that the right way to do this is over the Internet. There seem to be a bunch of services out there which are Mac compatible, but which one?

I've seen positive mentions of Mozy and the pricing looks reasonable at $4.95 per month for "unlimited" data. There have been several positive reviews of it over the last few years, but some less positive ones too - such as these observations from Michael Horowitz at CNET.com. But I've seen comments reporting that it can be slow, that backups sometimes disappear from the Mozy servers and that restores are a pain.

Backblaze gets positive reports too. But the download says "Intel Macs only", so I'm out of luck.

IDrive, perhaps. 150GB of storage for $4.95/month isn't quite unlimited enough. I've around 50GB of photos in Aperture and 150GB of music. I'm sure the latter could be pruned (some of it is podcasts) but I don't like the idea of being limited to a fraction of the capacity of my hard drive.

A more general observation is that all these products appear to be Mac versions of what started out as a tool for Windows users. I don't have a problem with that in itself, but there's a difference in the kind of protection that I'm looking for an Internet-based backup to provide. Since I'm using Time Machine, I'm not looking for something to protect me from finger trouble or accidental deletions of files. Neither am I too concerned about my hard disk failing. I'm pretty well protected against both of those problems.

As a result, I'm probably looking for something simpler than many of these products.

What I want is something that will provide protection against disasters. An offsite copy of my Time Machine backup disk might not be a bad start. I'd also feel slightly happier if the solution didn't involve my data being shipped across the Atlantic, since I'm based in the UK.

Ideas, anyone?

The "Apple Tax" is actually a "Microsoft Tax"

Or: How to alienate and antagonize your customers

Microsoft is clearly feeling some pain from Apple's growth, as demonstrated by the recent interviews given by various of its people who are now more urgently repeating messages about PCs being better than Macs and about what they like to call the "Apple Tax".  Two nice examples are the late September interview with Steve Ballmer in pcmag.com and one with Brad Brooks in CNET.

There's much in these interviews that sounds like desperation and I have neither the time nor the patience to dissect them in detail.  I'd just like to focus on one thing, the statement that "you don't really get full Microsoft Office [on the Mac]."  

Well, whose fault is that, Mr Ballmer?

I use a Mac at work (through choice) and I use Microsoft Office because that's what everyone else uses.  On the whole, Office 2008 on the Mac works pretty well.  But, as Steve Ballmer says, it falls short of Office on Windows in a couple of respects.

The first is compatibility with the Exchange, the widely used mail and calendaring server.  In years gone by, Microsoft used to sell a version of Outlook for the Mac that worked pretty much like Outlook on Windows.  But then Microsoft dropped Outlook on the Mac for something called Entourage, and Entourage is what you get with Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac.  

Entourage is fine as a mail tool and while there are some bizarre bugs with font sizes (thanks to deficiencies in the HTML it generates) it works pretty well.  

On the downside, its integration with Exchange is deficient.  You can't book resources (meeting rooms, for example) using Entourage, and checking another user's calendar is a long-winded process.  Some of this is simply because Entourage simply doesn't have access to the full set of APIs that it needs to work well with Exchange.

If Exchange were a third party product, that might be excusable.  But it isn't.  Microsoft makes Exchange and defines the APIs.  It also makes Entourage.  Can it get them to talk together properly?  Apparently not.

The other niggle is Excel.  In Microsoft Office 2008, Microsoft have dropped support for macros.  Microsoft now says that this support will return in a later release, but once again, this is Microsoft failing to support its own customers.  Fixing the problem cannot be impossible - apparently OpenOffice has VBA support on the Mac (and other platforms).  

Neither of these problems are show stoppers for me, though the VBA one is for quite a few people.  The reliability, freedom from viruses and overall performance of the Mac makes it a pleasure to use, even with these shortcomings in Microsoft's software.  But it does annoy me that Microsoft have clearly chosen to try to degrade the user experience of their customers who fail to loyally keep paying for Microsoft Windows. 

Here in the UK, Microsoft are selling Office Ultimate 2007 for £38.95, including tax.  You need an ".ac.uk" email address to get this price (it's aimed at students).  Funnily enough, the offer seems only to apply to Office for Windows.  Office 2008 for the Mac (Student Edition) is £79.97 on Amazon, while standard edition is £329.98.

Apple Tax?  Or Microsoft Tax?