In any event, it’s published now, and you can head over to TMO to read it.

[The previous post here still stands: follow me on Twitter if you want to see more frequent/current updates from me.]

I would love to be able to download an app and have a 24-hour trial period. If I like it, I’ll buy it. If I don’t, it magically disappears from my device, never to return unless I fork over the cashola.

Post your comments over at iPO, if you please — there’s already a good trail happening there and we should keep the conversation in one place.

And we let him release it. Crazy, huh?

Well, it’s out there, and it’s alive. You can check it out as it appears as MacVoices #8144.

I know I say it all the time, but I’ll say it again: I am *so* honored to be a part of this band and the friendships we have developed together. Definitely a highlight of Macworld Expo each year and a highlight of my experience in the Mac community and beyond

*Technically, we did get the band into an AIM-style “private, band-only” chat room in the very beginning to “chat out” the setlist prior to rehearsal. For all of the following gigs we found that having a (benevolent?) dictator assigned to manage the list was far more productive. Or at least it was easier, and we’re all for that.

The results of our chat — and Don’s superb editing — can be heard and downloaded over at the Mac Roundtable site.

Starting in 1995 and up until February when Apple’s Time Capsule came out, I was a died-in-the-wool Retrospect user. But I got sick. and. tired. of. waiting. for. an. update. Even still there’s no Intel native version of Retrospect (due Real Soon Now… in October, or maybe later), and to me that means it’s not currently a viable option anymore. Combine that with Mac OS X Leopard’s Time Machine and Time Capsule and, well, life can be better than Retrospect.

And it is.

Time Capsule/Time Machine

I have 5 Macs to back-up. 4 of them are on Leopard, and one is on Tiger (too old to run Leopard). All 4 Leopard machines back up to a 1TB Time Capsule. The TC sits over at the house, and is connected via Gigabit Ethernet buried underground. This means if the office burns down the Time Capsule likely won’t go with it, and vice versa regarding the house. Semi-off-site I like to call it. So that’s one line of defense.

SuperDuper

I also use SuperDuper daily to clone my MacBook Pro’s hard drive to an external FireWire drive sitting here in my office. This provides both a second backup as well as an “instant boot” method if my main drive were to go down at any point.

Additionally, I use SuperDuper on the Tiger machine to back up critical files daily to the Time Capsule. Yes, though Tiger can’t run Time Machine, it can very much see the Time Capsule as a shared drive, and this works perfectly.

IMAP

Because I use IMAP for my mail, my “current” email is stored on the three Macs I use regularly (MacBook Pro in office, iMac in studio, Dual G4 over at house), so that’s backed up. Because of this, I exclude the mail directories from Time Machine backups on all but my MacBook Pro (those being [home]/Library/Mail/IMAP-[name of mailbox]). No need to back that data up again onto the same Time Capsule drive.

iDisk

Earlier this year, I decided to fully adopt the “cloud computing” concept and moved all of my documents up to my iDisk. This doesn’t include pictures or music, but pretty much everything else is there. It takes up about 3 GB. The beauty is that the iDisk can be synced for offline usage to any (or all) of my Macs. So again I have it synced to the 3 Macs I use most, and again I exclude it from Time Machine on all but one of them (this is done by excluding [home]/Library/FileSync, for those playing along at home).

MobileMe Sync

Since I use multiple computers as well as an iPhone, I take full advantage of MobileMe’s ability to sync Contacts, Calendars, and Bookmarks. And while I don’t fully consider this a backup necessarily, it certainly acts as one since the data exists on all 3 computer plus the MobileMe cloud.

So I have all of my data in at least two places, and some of it in as many as 6. Yes it seems a little obsessive when you break it down, but it really all flows very smoothly together with the sole exception of MobileMe Sync, which is not entirely reliable and requires massaging and resetting about once every six weeks. The rest of it has worked like a charm since I started down this path in February, and I have no intention of changing any time soon.

If you have any questions, please just feel free to comment and ask.

Though Peter works for the competition, I am quite lucky to consider Peter a personal friend. And while I’m sure Macworld’s sales team was as ecstatic as I was when the article went live, I can guarantee you they were of no direct influence here. Peter writes this from the heart, and really from the angle of wanting to ensure that excellent applications don’t fall by the wayside simply because developers neglected the need to actively promote their products.

Bravo, Peter. And bravo to all of you who follow this advice. We’ll be sharing this around to our clients at BackBeat Media, and I’m sure they’ll be seeing it from the competition, as well. Good for one, good for all. And in the end, good for the consumer.

The first is in person at the Seacoast MUG here in Rye, New Hampshire on Tuesday, May 13th. I’ll be presenting my “Running Your Mac Lean, Clean & Mean” session that I did this past Macworld Expo, and perhaps adding in some stuff we simply couldn’t do for a big crowd there. [UPDATE: a PDF of my slides from this is now available.]

Second is Monday the 19th. John F. Braun (of Mac Geek Gab podcast fame!) and I will be virtually attending the Cleveland, Ohio NCMUG meeting via iChat. Should be a blast!