iCloud – cloudy goodness and reducing the time and cost of music backups

Apple Introduced the latest version of OS X 10.7, iOS 5 and a mobileme replacement – iCloud.

Whilst a lot has been said on the blogosphere that does not need repeating, there a few interesting nuggets to take away from the Apple announcement.

New version of the operating system that powers iDevices – can’t complain, looks nice, move along.

Latest version of OS X 10.7 – interesting meld of iPhone/iPad features – system wide auto saving and versioning all documents.
It will be interesting to see how it interacts with application auto-save features existing software.
Will it back the temp files created by Indesign or MYOB?
Also, purchase is via the App Store built into OS X 10.6.6 or later. There is no mention of how to upgrade from previous versions of OS X.
Also being an online download of approximately 4 GB , if you upgrade a new few machines, that will be a massive amount of internet usage.

iCloud – Hopefully the roll-out will be smooth compared to when Mobile Me was released.
Looking from a brand perspective, I still can’t recommend it for email etc… as it is not under your domain name and most likely never will be.
For sharing documents, calendars, emails etc… Google Apps is still a better choice.
Better support, attached to your domain name, aggressive roll-out of new features and more.

The 2 best features are cost – free, and the iTunes Match paid addition.
Alot of my clients, being creative, have huge libraries of acquired music.
The service will scan them and if they are part of the iTunes catalogue of 18 million songs, they do not need to be uploaded. If they are not on the catalogue, they are uploaded and synced across up to 10 devices.
The limit is 25000 songs (purchases from iTunes are excluded) which equates to around 75GB of songs.
If you had to backup an iTunes library of this size to disk it would take around an hour, if you had to upload to the cloud with Amazon’s or Google’s service, it would take weeks!!
Since with iTunes Match does not need to upload anything already on the iTunes catalogue, the online backup could take literally minutes.

2 comments

  1. David Stone says:

    Good question.
    The answer is a resounding – “Maybe”
    Even if the upgrade (due out next month) is the best thing since peanut butter/bacon/banana sandwiches, I always recommend holding off at least till the first update. No one releases major updates without flaws – that includes Microsoft, Adobe or Apple.
    Some old software WILL NOT run, and even of the software could run, some of the old installers won’t work due to the lack of Rosetta (PowerPC translation software layer)
    Lion does have some great features like system wide auto/incremental save with versioning, airdrop for filesharing and OS X Server (unlimited user licence) for $49.99. Imagine Microsoft selling unlimited user versions of Windows Server and Exchange at that cost.
    D Revolution will be upgrading straight away – let us break our systems so you don’t have to!

Comments are closed.