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Ok so i’ve installed Bandwagon and now I’m going to write about it for you all to read and then decide weather you’re going to use it. Enjoy.

Install
I was impressed with the installation. It was very elegant to look at and the whole setting up process took very little time. It asked for my FTP details and did the rest itself.

Usage
Bandwagon is nice, simple and responsive to use. The drop down menu could be quite confusing on first inspection but you’ll get used to all those options. I, myself only have a very small iTunes library on my Macbook (about 50 songs). Where as on my PC I have over 29GB of music. I hate to think how long it would take to backup all that though, as I have a 448kbps (50kb/sec) backup speed. Hopefully my upload speed will increase to 1.3mb/s soon.

Web Dashboard
Bandwagon has a lovely web dashboard for you to use. Simply login with your email and password and it’ll tell you everything you need to know. This is a great idea if you were to leave your Mac on whilst at work etc and wanted to check how it’s going.

Support
I’m yet to request support for my bandwagon account but I’m sure if I did i’d get a quick response, they all seem like a nice bunch. They have a forum which I have to admit doesn’t seem overly active but I’m sure it’s enough for now.

Preferences
The preferences window sports Queue, Backup, Restore, Stats, Storage, Billing & Prefs tabs. All of which seem appropriate. Queue allows you to select which items you want to backup. You could choose to backup just Audiobooks for example. Restore does as it says and restores things. Stats gives a nice little bar showing uploaded in green and items to be backed up in orange. Storage allows you to set the FTP Server, Username & password. For some strange reason you can’t change the path after it’s been set. You can also set how much storage to use, I simply chose Unlimited. Billing I guess would be useful if I paid for it. It simply tells me the # of computers I’m using my account with and when my account Expires. The prefs window allows you to set if you want the Pop-up alerts to show and if you want Bandwagon to launch on login. All of which can be seen here.

Negatives
Ok so as with most online backup services it’s rather slow. Now I’m sure it all depends on your ISP and the FTP server you are backing up to. As a resident of the UK I very much doubt there’s THAT many people with an upload above 50kb/sec. So for me I’d rather just buy an external drive and backup to that. When I deleted a file from iTunes bandwagon detected it but took ages to do anything about it. I clicked for it to restore but it just seemed to do nothing. I don’t know weather the restore was queued behind the backup, it wasn’t very clear. It told me it would take just over an hour to do my 36 songs. Imagine if I had a library of over 1000?

Feature Requests
I don’t have many feature requests. In fact there’s only one I can think of and that’s the ability to just have it run in the Menu bar and remove the dock icon.

All in all a nice application and it’s good to see that there are people developing tools to help us in a moment of crisis. It’s a nice app to have if you have a fast upload or if you FTP to a local computer, that way backing up your Mac’s iTunes would be lovely using Bandwagon. Unfortunately I’m not won over and won’t be using it in the future… I’d rather just use an external drive.

Want a free Dreamhost account for all your backups? Check out this blog post.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Backup, OS X, Software, iTunes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.