gDisk: iDisk With a “g!”
When .Mac was first released, it was something that some were wishing for. After purchasing it, you received special promotions, an email address, your own website, and many other neat things.
One of the many great perks that came with getting a .Mac account is the iDisk. The iDisk can be thought of as a virtual hard drive. Dragging files into the iDisk creates a backup by moving them to a server based hard drive, keeping your senstitive data not only centralized but safe from local disk crashes and other folly.
What do you do if you’re too cheap to buy a .Mac account?
You do what I did: download gDisk. gDisk is essentially the same thing as an iDisk, but it does not mount on your desktop. All you need in order to run gDisk is a working GMail account. Once you have this, all you need to start uploading to GMail is a little time.
Upon starting gDisk up, you are prompted for your user name and password. If you do not have a GMail account, just click the “New Account” button. If this is your first time using gDisk, it may be wise to allow gDisk to create the default labels for you. Now, you are ready to get down to business.
First, select the default label that best describes what you are backing up. If none of them fit, you can hit “New Label.” Also, if there is a label you are not going to use you can hit “Delete Label.” to zap it. Now, click the “Upload” button, navigate to what you want uploaded, and click “Open.” When you need to download these files later, you simply hit the “Download” button.
Over time, you will realize that some of the items you uploaded previously are fit for the garbage. This is where the “Move to Trash” button comes into play. Just select the item you do not want backed up, and delete it. If you delete something by accident, there is one way to get it back. Log into you gMail account and take the “Draft” out from the trash.
gDisk also has some minor limitations. First, it cannot be used with GMail accounts tied to your own domain (i.e. oh@well.com). Also, because of GMail’s space limit, there is only a certain amount of space you can use for uploading to GMail (10GB). While avoiding these problems is not always easy, gDisk is still a really useful program when you consider its free.
Now you have a fully functional iDisk, without shelling any money out. gDisk is currently at version 0.6.1 and is available as a Universal Binary. Enjoy!
It’s a nice app but doesn’t provide a way to mount the “gDisk” directly in the finder.
Does anyone know an app which provides such functionality? I know that there’s such an app for windows but haven’t found something similar for OSX.
Thanks in advance
I was going to say the same thing… I recommend JungleDisk for Mac/PC/Windows. It mounts an Amazon S3 share as a disk, giving you unlimited and highly secure and redundant disk space for a tiny cost.
I backup 7GB of files (via Mac) and it costs me around 1$ a month. I can access them from anywhere, including my Windows PC at work
This program is a great idea and I loved the idea when I first found it. However it’s still a bit buggy and hasn’t been updated in a long time. From what I can see, development has stalled, and there are still a bunch of key features that could be added (like remembering the accounts you’ve used before etc)
There is alos spymacdisk from http://classic.spymac.com/club/index.php. 30 day free after that its 25 a year and works great with finder.
It won’t work at all for me. When I create a new label it crashes, everytime. At first I couldn’t even get it to open because it asked me to create the default labels but would crash when I told it yes.
You should mention that those type of software could get your Gmail account banned.
Forgot to mention the URL for JungleDisk – http://www.jungledisk.com
Gmail is for email.
i have the same problem as jamie
Another WebDAV client for Mac is TrunkDrive from ElephantDrive. They also use S3 but don’t require you to create your own account with them…
http://www.elephantdrive.com
Thanks for the ElephantDrive hint. Looks promising.
[...] little application can edit, rotate, crop and resize your image or screenshot and upload it to your iDisk (.Mac account), FTP, WebDAV server or Flickr, SmugMug or ImageShack account. It also has support [...]
Same issue as Jason – crashed on label creation – do yourselves a favour – don’t use this software – its unstable – used amazon jungledisk – worked first time
use cyberduck its a great program
but you need an online drive to use it
if your looking for a free backup solution: live.sync.com gives you unlimeted space i have a whole 120gb backed up there!
for a free idisk type service there are many: dropbox* ( getdropbox.com ) zumodrive** ( zumodrive.com ) and skydrive*** ( skydrive.live.com )
*2GB Free; ipod touch app available
**1GB Free; ipod touch app for playback of music off zumodrive and access of other files
***25GB; upload llimitation on upload file sizes
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