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dreamhost posts

Filed under: Software, Internet Tools, iTunes

DreamHost offers free year of Bandwagon iTunes backup and sync service

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on Jul 4th, 2007

It sure has been getting easier lately to use an account with web hosting behemoth DreamHost to back up your Mac. We found some good ideas for this back in April, but now DreamHost has gone one step further and partnered up with Bandwagon, a web-based iTunes backup service we found in March. In one of their annoyingly lengthy blog posts (scroll to the end of it), DreamHost unveiled that they are now offering a free one-year membership to Bandwagon's DIY services to all DreamHost customers, available through the end of July. This is a great deal, especially if you have both an expanding iTunes library and a massive chunk of storage at DreamHost just waiting for something to do.

To access the offer, current DreamHost customers need only to go to the new Partners Page in the DreamHost control panel, then click on the Bandwagon logo to be taken to the Bandwagon signup page with the coupon code already inserted. The rest of the setup is pretty straight-forward, though I think I should share the solution I developed for a slight snag I ran into: For whatever reason, Bandwagon's FTP client couldn't log into my DreamHost account to begin uploading my iTunes library until I created a brand new FTP user. I don't know if this will hold true for everyone, but it's probably a good idea from a security standpoint anyway, take that advise how you will.

So far, after finally signing up for Bandwagon and getting everything going, I'm pretty happy with the service. Bandwagon's account manager can display statistics of what kinds of data and how many you have stored online. I'll have to see how the rest of the upload process on my 6396 item iTunes library fares before I say much more, but until then this sounds like a great deal that DreamHost customers shouldn't pass up.

Tags: backup, bandwagon, dreamhost, ftp, itunes, online, storage, sync

Filed under: Software, Internet Tools, Widget Watch

Widget Watch: DreamHost status

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on May 24th, 2007

I'm a pretty happy DreamHost customer, though I've been with enough basic hosting plans to realize that many hosts (at least the ones in my price range) might experience some hiccups from time to time. It just seems to be the way hosting is, at least in my tax bracket. Fortunately, DreamHost offers a status website and RSS feed to help customers check in on the network, but a fellow DreamHost customer by the name of Geoff has created a Dashboard widget just to give us one more option for staying on top of things. The widget simply loads the same status text one can read via the website or RSS, but it offers a compact, quick-access window into the world of DreamHost's status without having to refresh a website or add yet another feed to your exponentially increasing RSS list.

Tags: dreamhost, hosting, status, widgets

Filed under: How-tos, Tips and tricks, Internet Tools

Backup your Mac to DreamHost

by Mat Lu (RSS feed) on Apr 2nd, 2007

Michael Lee at the Addison Road blog has put together a nice tutorial for doing an online backup to a DreamHost account. DreamHost is a well known shared hosting provider that offers a reasonably good deal on website hosting, with about 170GB of storage for about $8 a month. Michael is basically suggesting that if you have a site with DreamHost, but don't use anywhere near your allotment of storage and bandwidth, you can use some of that space for online backup instead of one of dedicated online backup services like JungleDisk with S3, Omnidrive or Joyent BingoDisk. Michael's solution involves using OS X's built-in command line tool rsync to do the heavy lifting (the actual backing up), scheduled using iCal alarms calling an AppleScript.

In fact, I have been a DreamHost customer for quite some time, and I use my hosting account like this as well. Instead of using rsync like Michael, however, some time ago I set up an Automator workflow that calls the Transmit FTP client to upload backups to a WebDAV folder as suggested on the Strongspace blog. One advantage of doing it this way is that I can mount that WebDAV folder in the Finder to grab files off of it (or even access it through a web browser). However you do it, taking advantage of online storage space you might already be paying for is a good idea.

[Via Digg]

Tags: backup, dreamhost, rsync

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