The Everlasting Legacy of iDisk.

I once said about the venerable optical disc drive:

... once a main source of getting large masses of data into and out of your computer, or the only way to rip and burn music and your home movies onto CDs and DVDs, these optical drives are fast becoming superseded by the ever-more-imperative and ever-so-heavily used network interface.

With the impending closure of MobileMe, I am now about to lose a remote backup solution—iDisk. The remote disk in the cloud was where I'd put some backups of just-important-enough data so that I can recover them from other computers, including my phone, whenever and wherever I need it.

Until the end of June, 2012, when iDisk is scheduled to go down in history, permanently.

There may be solutions from other providers that can replace iDisk, such as Dropbox, however, there is one thing that made iDisk an attractive solution for offloading your data into the cloud: some unique integration with Mac OS X.

The system applications that took advantage of http://idisk.mac.com/ included the Finder and the Standard File Package, iChat, Mail, Address Book, iCal and Sherlock 2, and an application that was offered outside the scope of Mac OS X itself, .Mac Backup. Except for Sherlock 2, the level of integration with iDisk remained right up until Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, although publication of such integration was shoved over to the side in Apple's marketing. Even Mac OS 9 has had some level of integration with iDisk, through iTools, right up until iTools became .Mac in 2002.

iDisk accessibility and support persisted right through to when Apple's on-line services became MobileMe, after .Mac survived through three major Mac OS X releases. In 2008, iDisk became accessible to Web users through http://www.me.com/, and remains accessible directly in the Finder and the system's Standard File Package, and the slightly-modified-for-MobileMe Backup 3.2. This support will end when iDisk finally disappears off the ethers next year.

Because Backup 3 allows users to back up files to iDisk, this capability will be lost when iDisk disappears. It was a way for people to perform remote backups to Apple's own servers, so that information can be made readily available to MobileMe subscribers on other devices, wherever they have access to the Internet. With iDisk's disappearance, remote backup will be a lost capability to Mac OS X and iOS users.

Which draws me back to the venerable optical disc drive. I once called it a waste of space inside my laptop... now I may have to retract that statement, because it will be the only way I can perform off-site backups of data without resorting to other tools and solutions. Other ideas could include the following when getting Backup 3 (or other backup tools) to back up your data as an off-site backup solution:

• USB memory sticks,
• iPods with internal hard disks, such as the iPod classic,
• pocket hard drives, such as the excellent WD My Passport drives,
• a network file server.

Any of these solutions, including transportation and storage of your media away from your workplace, would need to be considered as a replacement for iDisk.

And for those machines that never had built-in optical drives, it makes the USB port the most heavily-used port on your computer unless you can find a network solution to replace iDisk (such as these network gadgets).

iDisk was instrumental for the implementation of .Mac and MobileMe, and their services. However, iDisk was also useful in its own right as a filesystem service for users to copy any data they wanted as a remote backup or instant accessibility solution. With that fundamental service gone, users will no longer have a way to copy files to a remote network service unless they arrange to make their own tools and obtain new service providers to replace what Apple made available for over a decade.

On top of that, the absence of iDisk will cause older machines to start malfunctioning if users are not careful. Integrated accessibility user interfaces to iDisk services in the Finder and in the Standard File Package will cause computers to hang unnecessarily if users attempt to use these interfaces after iDisk is shut down permanently next year. While the iDisk sidebar item can be removed from the sidebar of Finder windows, unfortunately, the iDisk menu in the Finder's Go menu is a permanent fixture of the Finder and cannot be removed, and people will have to treat these commands as items never to select, ever again.

—tonza