.Mac Alternatives?

peel asks: "In the endless effort to get organized I'm looking for an alternative to signing up for a .Mac account that allows me to sync iCal and the Address Book between multiple computers (mainly work and home). I found iSyncCal to let me sync calendars, I can also publish them using my personal server setup with WebDav. I haven't found any such utilities for addresses. What I really want is something that works more like .Mac but that I can run at home on my server without paying the monthly .Mac fees. What are some solutions people are using for syncing contact info for people stored in multiple places (Palm, cell, work computer, home computer, laptop)?" There was a similar discussion over on MacInTouch, although the alternatives offered cover more basic needs, the information may still prove useful for those looking for "a cheaper .Mac".

Comments

Another "how-to" article

[awtbfb]

"Six Great Tips for Homemade Dot Mac Servers"

Re:Another "how-to" article

[hobbit]

Seems a bit out of date now, though... Apache now includes mod_rendezvous_apple, and iTunes 4 takes care of streaming music between networked machines.

Re:Third Device

[dthable]

According to Palm, this is not recommended. I used to transfer data via my m500 and found a lot of duplicate entries. I don't know if a computer ID is a part of the record, but it didn't work for me.

syncML

[xj9000]

Most of the fancy devices use syncML which is the XML schema for transfering all your contacts and addressbook information. on sourceforge there is a program called Sync4J which is a java program you can connect to from your devices over the web and transfer/sync all your data http://sourceforge.net/projects/sync4j/

It's not cost-effective to roll your own.

[Duck_Taffy]

How much time per month are you going to spend maintaining your own server? What's it going to cost in terms of bandwidth? What will the electricity cost you? If you value your time at all, get .mac, because it works out to only $8.33 per month, and you're quite likely to spend more than an hour per month working on your sever, and quite likely won't have the reliability of the real .mac, which also backs up your data to backup servers nightly.

For example, look at the scenario of what if a hard drive dies. If it dies in your server, you go out and spend $100 on a new hard drive, and possibly lose months of information, and may have days of downtime while you reconfigure everything. If it dies in a .mac server, you don't pay a dime, and at most, you lose one day's data, and experience no or very little downtime.