A new user recently emailed us to point out that My Docs Online, using WebDAV and the Desktop App, is working nicely as an alternative to MobileMe and iDisk, which will no longer be available after June.
Here’s what he said to us:
I just signed up for your service after evaluating many others over the last few days. Your interface seems closest to what I had with the iDisk under Apple’s Mobile Me. I upgraded to Lion and also had to find something before June 30 when the iDisk goes away.
I use the OverTheAir app for my iPhone and iPad2 to get to your site, I use the “go to server” (WebDAV) method on my OS 10.6 Mac computer and the desktop app on my Lion (10.7) Mac.
– Bud Cothern
Apple’s iCloud is very different from iDisk. iDisk is (soon to be was) a remote server that is organized like a typical drive, with a folder tree, and accessible via standard, open methods like WebDAV. iCloud is closed, and accessible only via apps using the interface provided by the operating system. It’s another outgrowth of iOS, where the location of files is generally hidden, and files are accessible from the apps that handle them. Mountain Lion for the Mac will work much the same when it is released later this year.
That means there’s no way to use the iCloud storage outside the services and apps that make use of it, such as iPhoto, iTunes Match, iWork, and AppStore apps that makes use of the iCloud Storage APIs.
For anyone used to the functionality of idisk for quickly receiving large documents, whether it be pdf’s, jpegs, xlsx etc. qickly without hassle then you must check this out! I know I’ll have to pay but having just started my Free 15 day trial I am up and running within 8 minutes on all my devices and PC – terrific No Hassle!
Thanks – we couldn’t have put it better ourselves 😉
I have set it up but can’t mount the disk in a dozen tries in various ways. Presumably it will eventually mount for me.
It’s obvious Apple is offering no helpful advice on connecting to a webdav server. I’ve been a very loyal Mac user since 1987 both personally and in my newspaper business. When they put out the iPhone on AT&T only, I went Android as we have no AT&T service here. When they quit iDisk, I went to Jungle Disk which worked perfectly just like iDisk but RackSpace Hosting bought Jungle Disk and torpedoed it too, it’s not true webdav any more.
I have bought a half dozen cloud solutions incl iDrive, LiveDrive, ZumoDrive, Amazon S3, have long been a user of Google Docs now Google Drive, and including CyberDuck, Transmit, Otixo but can’t make any of them work.
All combinations that I’ve done to mount the cloud drive like iDisk and then Jungle Disk did, spending over 40 hours trying, mostly do the error -36 and quit there, or act like they copy the file but the file then is empty, just a name only.
I REALLY used and depended on iDisk and then Jungle Disk and am lost without them. I use 6 different Macs and the file I need is always on some other computer, I often don’t even know which one has the current version. I refuse to use Sync, which only works online, off line the file may not be the current version. I insist on there existing ONE FILE and one file only, it always being the current version.
But Apple obviously offers essentially no help for webdav, and perhaps is intentionally screwing webdav up using the -36 error, to force us to us iCloud.
Those who use iCloud will just be building more and more documents which cannot be opened except by iCloud users who have bought the applications from Apple. That’s the way Bill Gates made himself the wealthiest man in the world. Not a place I will ever go willingly. Google is better and my life is now in Google but I don’t trust them much either for the same reasons.
I once thought a lot of Apple, not so much any more.
Surely someone can build a webdav drive system with webdav for Mac that works easily with no error 36 like iDisk did!
Hi Dave – thanks for leaving the comment. We’d be very interested in helping you with this. Is the error code 36 you’re seeing something you see when trying to connect to our servers? If so at which point to you see the error code? If you think it would be useful please email any screenshots to [email protected].