Syncing iDisk Locally To Your Mac

MobileMe is the service everyone wants to love but doesn't always live up to everyone's expectations. In this brave new world of iPhones it would seem that its most useful feature is syncing your data between your Mac and your iPhone. MobileMe can do a lot more than this and much of that functionality will be covered on this blog in the future. Today however, let's talk about iDisk.

iDisk is part of MobileMe and it works just like a network share or a flash drive. The difference is that iDisk lives "in the cloud" (online). You can access it from anywhere you can get an Internet connection (and where can't you find Internet these days). It's a great way to deposit files in a location independent of your Mac so you can access them somewhere else. In fact, you don't even need a Mac to use it! Logging into Me.com will let you use iDisk using a web interface. Nifty.

Let's say, hypothetically, you have your trusty MacBook with you on a long road trip. It's getting late and you are tired. You pull into a hotel and get a room. Before going to sleep, you decide to write a few pages of the next great American novel. You've been keeping it on your iDisk so you can work on it from your iMac at home and your MacBook on the go. You look for that data port in your room. It's not there. Well, surely they have WiFi. What's this? There's NO WiFi? There's No Internet At All!?! This is beginning to sound like a horror flick. The people running that hotel should be punished for their cruelty.

If only you could access your iDisk offline. As it turns out, you can.

Go to System Preferences and click on MobileMe. Next, click on the iDisk button at the top of the window. At the bottom of this window there is an option for iDisk Sync. Click the Start button. That's it. That's all you have to do. From here, Mac OS X will keep a local copy of your iDisk and it will sync the changes automatically when you are online. If you would rather sync your data manually, you can change it here as well.

Now get to work on that novel! Having no Internet is no excuse to slack off now.