Bandwagon Launches - Online iTunes Backup
Bandwagon has just launched not more than an hour ago (3am EST). Bandwagon is an online iTunes backup service for Mac users. It’s not free with an introductory price of $69 per year, but they provide a remarkably simple way to keep your music collection safe. Hard drives die all the time, but web services don’t. Haha, okay you’ll have to excuse me for that lame line.
Bandwagon is built around a powerful OS X application that lets you select which songs you wish to backup or restore. Once you select songs to backup, they will begin uploading to Bandwagon’s servers one by one. As you might have imagined, this can be an extremely slow process if you are toting your typical garden-variety cable line.
I have yet to get my hands dirty with Bandwagon but that shouldn’t take long as they are apparently giving away free accounts to bloggers not anymore. If you’re interested in Bandwagon, bite now as the $69 introductory pricing is only valid until the end of February. Bandwagon is only for Mac users at this time (ever?).
What do you think of Bandwagon? Will you make use of it or does your external hard drive serve the same (and faster) purpose? Amazingly, my iTunes folder is only 28GB… a vast dichotomy from the 160GB (all legal of course) days during freshman year, so it might be reasonable to selectively backup songs with Bandwagon.
This has to be one of the most pointless start-ups you’ve covered so far Paul. If you have your mac, and external harddisk and an iPod, you will already have three copies of your iTunes library anyway.
iTunes will sync with the iPod, and you can use something like Carbon Copy Cloner, to make daily copies of your music folder to an external disk if you wish.
IF you should stream your songs back again, there could be some benefit, although an iPod is already ultra portable, so again this whole service seems just superfluous.
This is a great idea - especially for travellers. I’ll consider using this during my next long adventure.
to my mind, its quite pricey. id feel more comfortable using 70$ on an external drive even with the risk of a failing disk. ‘web services dont fail’ you made my day^^
Paul I hate to go so far off topic… but was it you who did a review on a software that looks into your iTunes and tells you about shows for those bands…
I can’t find it anywhere!!
@docmisterio, any of these?
http://paulstamatiou.com/2006/10/19/tangerine-enters-a-crowded-market-pwns-all/
http://paulstamatiou.com/2006/10/10/qloud-makes-itunes-tagging-possible/
http://paulstamatiou.com/2006/10/04/soundflavor-itunes-meets-pandora/
Thanks Paul, however, it is none of those… but I’ll tell you the concept (and I swear I ran across it here, hehe)
It’s a software that syncs with iTunes and then tells you about shows from the bands you have in your iTunes in your area, I just can’t find it anywhere…
Thanks man!
I’ve been testing Bandwagon as well, but unfortunately the current version has no way to throttle down the upload speed. This leads to my cable connection being pounded, and then disconnecting (thanks, Cox). Future versions of Bandwagon should have a throttle ability, but for now, it’s severely limited my usability of the software.
docmisterio: you’re probably referring to iConcertCal?
@Konstantinos - Thanks! That was it!
docmisterio: you’re welcome.
and when your hard drive crashes and you want all your songs back, are you supposed to spend a couple days downloading them? IMO, a 250gig external hard drive, pretty much the same price as 2 years subscription, is a way better route to go.
Yay we are not banned anymore!!!
I would think that online backups are the safest way to go. I agree that you could always backup to an external drive and there is also the iPod, but what happens if (god forbid) there is a fire and you lose your external drives and iPod? Now I’m sure if that happens you obviously have more important things to deal with than your iTunes Music collection, but at least for me, I know that I’ve been collecting music for well over five years and to lose all of that media would be disastrous, even if in a fire. Now there is the possibility of rotating an external backup drive off-site to ensure you don’t lose data, but that can get annoying. The way I see it, online backups provide the best of both worlds — they promise off-site backup and you don’t even have to get up from your desk to do it.
I’m with most of the people up top. It simply doesn’t make sense financially for me to sign up for that service. To buy an external hard drive vs. $69/year? Let’s throw some numbers at it. Take 250gb hard drive: WD My Book 250gb from Newegg: $114.99 out of your pocket right now. Let’s say in 3 years, you will outgrow it (as movies are quickly becoming a standard in iTunes library). So what’s $69/year * 3 years in todays money? Well, let’s say current inflation rate will stay the same (it won’t): 2%. That means in year 1, year 2’s $69 will be worth less (time value of money). Same for year 3. Add them up and it adds up to: $203…
For $178 you can be 500gb My Book from WD (external) and STILL pay less than this service. It makes even more sense NOT to use the service if you already own an external HD. It also saves the hassle of uploading (at least the initial time) of all the music. I use free iBackup which backs everything (music, movies, documents, photoshop files, etc.) that I need (~30gb right now) in under 30 mins. Doubt I can backup my 7gb of music in that time.
I would be interested in hearing from the company itself. They’re certainly taking the hassle of knowing how to backup music files from regular computer user, but then again, Mac will have a powerful backup tool build in soon. (I think Vista too? dunno).
Anyways, sorry for this babble. Just bored.
Dimitry