Why Spend $70 To Back Up Your iTunes Music?

Many Mac and Windows users are also iTunes users. The music we store in iTunes is valuable.

Is your music collection so valuable that you’d pay $70 to store all your music in an online backup service? Think about it.

At Mac360 we have a general rule that we review what we use, or what we’re willing to pay money for. We also preach the importance of backing up valuable data.

That scenario is frightfully simple. You turn on your Mac and nothing happens. The hard drive is dead. What about those thousands of digital photos, your priceless documents, thousands of email messages, and all your music?

Documents, email messages, and photos aside, if you have CDs, installing them into iTunes again may be laborious and time consuming, but it’s not a difficult task. Enter Xackup and Bandwagon.

Xackup is a company that provides a secure email backup via XackMail. $2 a month gets you automatic one click backup and restore for Apple’s Mail and Microsoft Outlook.

With Bandwagon, you get a similar backup for all your music in iTunes, but the price is $99 a year, or a little over $8 a month, or a lower $69 a year if you sign up before the end of February.

Xackup bills Bandwagon as a service for smart people, music geeks with an unreplaceable music library—the online iTunes backup service for Mac users.

What you get is a straightforward, Mac-like application which sits in the OS X menubar.

The utility is not drag and drop but allows you to select which iTunes songs are important and need to be backed up.

Bandwagon can restore any or all your lost or accidentally deleted iTunes “items” (Bandwagon doesn’t seem to differentiate songs from music videos from TV shows, though that’s not clarified.

TV shows and music take up much more hard drive space and take longer to backup and restore).

The queue manager utility displays a list of what you want backed up or restored so you’re truly just a click or two away from a restore.

Just so you’re not worried about sending all your iTunes “items” to some guy with a couple of extra hard drives connected to the internet, MacNN says Xackup uses Amazon’s highly touted S3 storage service, also called Amazon’s Simple Storage Service.

That helps to ensure that Xackup’s email and iTunes backups are on a fast network and have plenty of storage space and redundancy.

The basics again are unlimited storage of email for $2 per month, and unlimited storage of iTunes items for $99 a year ($69 by the end of February 2007).

Few Mac or Windows users would disagree that a good backup system is important for critical files—email, music, documents, whatever. What’s that worth?

Is it worth an extra hard drive? Is it worth a special backup utility? Finally, is it worth that much money to you, $2 a month for email, about $8 a month for iTunes, to have a secure online backup service?

If not, why not? What do you use for back up today?