Why Apple is charging you to store non-iTunes music in iCloud

If you own some music that you bought from iTunes and you choose to "upload" it into iCloud, you're not really uploading anything. Apple already has it. You originally bought it from them. They just have to store the fact that you are allowed to access their copy of the song. Six million people can "store" Poker Face in iCloud, Apple has to keep only the one copy. Us nerds call this single-instance storage.

On the other hand, if you ripped some music from a CD that you own, and you want to upload that into iCloud, Apple has to actually accept the song from you and allocate disk space to store it. That costs them money, and everyone knows that Apple doesn't do anything for free, so you can bet they're going to charge that cost back to you.

Slicehost: The Awesome Continues

Is it possible to restore a single file or directory from a backup?

I was recently in the same situation, it actually happened a little bit before Sep 4 and so I didn't have the benefit of looking at this thread. But I tried it anyway, just to see how Slicehost would handle it. I allocated a new slice sourced from the previous night's backup of my production slice. I scp'd my lost files back over to the production slice and then told Slicehost to delete the new slice. It took about 20 minutes to wait for the new slice to allocate, 10 minutes to retrieve my files, and 10 seconds to deallocate the new slice. Cost to me: 66 cents.

I don't know what these guys are thinking. With customer-friendly policies like these, how will they ever have a successful IPO?

I Can See Through Time

Time Machine: incremental backups and rsyncing are nothing new. But if you've ever been responsible for backups you know something about scheduling full dumps versus incremental dumps and layering restores and on and on... it used to be we'd try to come up with clever levelling strategies to optimize our storage space, but now storage has gotten cheap enough that I think everybody just does level ones all week and full dumps on Sundays.

Normally this is where we say "if you've ever tried to walk your mom thru doing X you'll appreciate how Apple makes it easy" but no one I know has EVER tried to walk their mom thru restoring a level zero and layering the most recent incremental over it. That's one of those things that (assuming you make backups for your parents) if you ever have to do a restore you just drive over and do it yourself, stopping for a six-pack on the way there and a fifth on the way home.

Is Time Machine the silver bullet so that now Mom can restore her own backups? Too early to say, but I think there's a chance. I think the interface to Time Machine is pretty damn clever. Obviously each of those windows in the stack stretching off to infinity represents a checkpoint on the backup volume, and you can browse them or search them, and when you find the file you want just drag and drop it back to the present. The slider on the right lets you zoom into the past, but it also lets you zoom back to the present, recovering windows that you had previously popped off the stack. Without that slider the windows would have to be represented as some kind of carousel instead of a stack, and would be much more difficult to navigate a la Fanta's Expose knock-off.

Even assuming Time Machine is every bit as effective and intuitive as its proponents say, is this going to change the face of computing? Of course not. It will "just" be the best backup and restore interface ever. Oh noes! Damn you Apple! I was expecting nanobots that trim my lawn while factoring prime numbers with XGrid!

It's like Dashboard. When Dashboard was previewed the majority response was "oh, it's just eyecandy." But if you actually use a Mac, every day, Dashboard is a great convenience. Just by throwing my mouse into a hot corner (another simple convenience that I love) I can see the weather, football scores, and the stock market, and also have a dictionary, a calculator, and a phone book. Flick the mouse into the hot corner again, and I'm back in my work environment.

Actually I'm not here to apologize for Time Machine or for Dashboard. The underlying theme here is Apple's products, their "innovation", and people's expectations. I think sometimes Apple is part of their own public expectation problem. Dashboard is NOT the centerpiece of anyone's workspace, and it was never meant to be, but when Apple trots it out they make it sound important enough to be a centerpiece. In a way you can't blame them - their people worked hard on these things and they did a great job and they deserve to have their work showcased. But if Apple made a toaster, they'd act like they'd invented bread.

The upcoming Web Parts feature is another example of the same phenomenon. I think Web Parts is going to be a great convenience for me - I anticipate making widgets so I can keep up with an auction or a discussion board or football games or anything else I feel like watching during my day. But if you watch the WWDC presentation, you kind of come away with the impression that Web Parts are so easy and so cool and so much goddammed fun that Apple expects us to spend all day every day making Web Parts. They don't say it, but the grandeur of the presentation is such that you just feel it. But really the exact opposite is true - Web Parts are supposed to be easy so that you don't spend all day making a widget. You make one in seconds and throw it away when you're done with it exactly because you didn't pour your sweat into it.

Part of the enjoyment of using a Mac is the sum of all these conveniences. I can read my mail with Thunderbird on Windows. I can browse the web with Firefox on Linux. But the sum of Expose and Dashboard and Spotlight and Quicksilver makes me happier and more efficient during my day.