Some people do lots of things with computers. I don’t. All I require of a computer is that it lets me…
<ul>
	<li>Write</li>
	<li>Plan, make notes and keep research</li>
	<li>Store research photos securely in a way I can go back to</li>
	<li>Do web and mail (not that there’s a computer out there that <em>can’t</em> do that)</li>
	<li>Not let me down by losing stuff</li>
</ul>
I’m typing this on Windows because, right now, it seems to me it does a better job of most of those than a Mac. Let me cover the last one of that list first though. Backup and syncing files across machines is a boring but important task if you earn a living from your work the way I do.

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On the Mac I relied on a battery of tools. I subscribed to MobileMe, which was .Mac when I first joined it. This cost £70 or so a year. It synced my address books and calendars and shared them across my desktop and laptop. It could run websites and store photos too, not that I needed that. It also offered email, which I tried just the once. It was so unreliable and incapable of dealing with spam I’d never trust it for a moment.

And MobileMe did backup. Once a night my data got stored on their servers. Did it work? I only ever tried to recover something once and all I got back was an error message. When I tried to solve this problem on the Apple forums – Apple tech support wasn’t much interested – some fanboi came on and said something to the effect, ‘Dude… didn’t you read the terms and conditions? Apple never said the backup was commercial quality, something you could rely on.’

Great, eh? So I forked out £250 or so for a 1terabyte Time Capsule for local backup. This works with the OS X backup mechanism Time Machine and stores your stuff continuously as you work. It’s all very flashy and pretty when you want to ‘go back in time’ and find something. Time Capsule works over the network and includes a wireless router, which I don’t need, and I suspect most people don’t either, since we have one with our broadband connection. It works mostly but it’s slow and prone to throw up connection errors from time to time. Naturally it doesn’t work terribly well with Windows (this is Apple, isn’t it?)

Finally, I kept a free <a href="http://www.dropbox.com" target="_blank">Dropbox</a> account and left important files in there. Dropbox stores them on its own servers and syncs them to other machines. It works fine but if you want more than 2 gb you have to pay a minimum of $9.99 a month which seemed a bit much on top of £70 a year to Mobileme.

I messed around with several variations of this setup with Windows. But Time Capsule was slow as ever so I did a little research and came up with a Western Digital My Book Essential. This is a one terabyte drive that plugs straight into a USB socket. It comes with its own very simple backup software which basically sets itself up. While a Time Capsule now costs £240 for one terabyte the My Book came in at £69, installed in a flash, and backed up the whole computer very quickly indeed from scratch (Time Capsule commonly takes overnight first time round because of the network connection -- it's faster if you plug it in rather than use wireless then go back to wireless, sigh...)

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/mybook1.jpg"><img style="display:inline;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;border:0 none;" title="mybook1" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/mybook1_thumb.jpg" alt="mybook1" align="right" border="0" height="244" width="150"></a> Time Machine’s interface remains complicated to me. Do you really need a bunch of flying windows filling the whole screen simply to recover a single file? The My Book backup software looks like this. It doesn’t backup the entire computer system (though you could do that manually if you wanted). Just the data and important bits, which is all I need.

Once you’ve installed it you can forget about it. The thing doesn’t nag you. It just sits there doing its job. If you have it attached to a laptop you can simply unhook the drive, go away for a while, then plug it back in and it backs up anything new.

This is the easiest backup system I’ve ever seen, much simpler than Time Machine. When you want to retrieve things the window looks like this.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/retrieve.jpg"><img style="display:inline;border:0 none;" title="retrieve" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/retrieve_thumb.jpg" alt="retrieve" border="0" height="435" width="604"></a>

And for good measure it will keep versions of files too, so you can go back in time, a lot more easily than you can with Time Machine it seems to me. I keep fifteen versions. Dead simple.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/history.jpg"><img style="display:inline;border:0 none;" title="history" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/history_thumb.jpg" alt="history" border="0" height="329" width="508"></a>

I used to think you needed to keep copies of everything backed up online too. But I now feel that’s overkill. My photos are stored with Flickr and Picasa. My music and past data are on the Western Digital. All I really need online are the projects I have that are active, and Dropbox is fine for that. Except that Microsoft have something even better, not that I’d heard of it till I started looking around.

It’s called <a href="http://www.mesh.com" target="_blank">Mesh</a> and it comes for free if you sign up for Windows Live, a package of services that include Hotmail and web calendars. Mesh is one of three slightly overlapping free data services available through Live.&nbsp; It's a bit like Dropbox, but more simple and it includes 5 gb of data for free. Unlike most other such services this doesn’t involve a special folder on your computer. You sign up for Live, install a piece of unobtrusive software, and then get hooked to the Mesh servers.

After that pick any file or folder, right click and you get an option, ‘Add file to Mesh’. Say yes and it gets synced. Sign into Live with Mesh on another computer and you see the same files and folders and sync them to that too. From that point on any changes made to file or folder will be synced to the machines using them.

The web interface is very simple indeed. Here is an illustration of how my desktop, laptop and netbook are linked.

<img style="display:inline;border:0 none;" title="mesh" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/mesh.jpg" alt="mesh" border="0" height="436" width="604">

There’s a little system tray app that also shows the latest activity, what computers are online, and what folders are being synced. You can use it with Macs too (though I haven’t tried).

This is exactly the kind of thing I thought Apple would be doing with MobileMe. But really that service hasn’t changed much in the past five years, apart from the name. And it costs, quite a lot. I get the impression it's not exactly high priority for Apple. Much like the Mac itself in some ways.
In addition to all this I have a static backup of my important past documents sitting on another Live freebie: my Sky drive. a free 25 gig virtual disk, a bit like MobileMe's iDrive. With USB external drive for local storage and Mesh for the current project that keeps me covered I think, and lets me share files very easily among machines.

Better than anything Apple offers. And free too.