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!