Dolly Drive brings cloud storage to Apple’s Time Machine

By Laura Khalil January 21, 2011

Dolly Drive will be featured as part of MacWorld’s Indie Spotlight. The event takes place January 27-29th.

Dolly Drive works with Time Machine to locally duplicate, store online and restart access to your digital world through online storage. Dolly lets MacBook laptop users back-up and recover their data through Time Machine anywhere they travel. Mac desktop users can either skip buying an external hard drive or use both for a hybrid cloud solution.

“Time Machine is one of Mac users favorite applications, yet it’s been left behind in the push to the cloud. That limitation is now over.” said Dolly Drive chief architect Anthony Palermo. “Dolly Drive lets you finally use Time Machine free of constraints and with its easy external hard drive integration, provides a complete back-up solution.”

Dolly will launch in five storage offerings from 10 to 500 gigs and starting at $5 per month. Dolly Drive Pro will launch for the business world and include professional level service and administration features.

Dolly Drive is a product of Cirrus Thinking, an online storage and application development company based in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Boca Raton.

MacWorld Expo has traditionally been one of the premier conferences for Apple enthusiasts. The expo lost some steam after Apple pulled out of the conference in 2010. Despite Apple no longer sponsoring the event, it remains a prime conference for Apple peripheral vendors.

The expo will feature a variety of training sessions, including how to use an iPad, tutorials on various third party software such as Photoshop and features a perfomance by Sinbad.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Apple

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Laura is a tech reporter for Digital Trends, the editor of Dorkbyte and a science blogger for PBS. She's been named one of…

Mobile

There’s no silver lining for iCloud users, and Apple needs to fix it

iphone storage

Apple’s iCloud service launched back in October 2011, just a couple of days before the iPhone 4S was released. Designed as a one-stop cloud storage service, it replaced MobileMe and provided iPhone owners with an easy way to wirelessly back up photos, documents, apps, settings, contacts, and more.

Anyone signing up for iCloud got 5GB of storage for free to be shared across all their Apple devices. If you wanted more, you’d have to pay a monthly fee for it. Very little has changed with iCloud in the last seven years. Even back in 2011, 5GB wasn’t a huge amount, but in 2018 it’s positively pathetic.
5GB simply is not enough
No matter how many thousands of dollars you’ve dropped on new iPhones, MacBooks, or other Apple devices over the years, you still only get 5GB for free -- an amount that’s woefully inadequate in the modern day.

Mobile

Google One subscriptions offer more cloud storage for low prices, other perks

google one news

Google Drive offers a lot of storage space by default with a free 15GB plan available for all. But if you're a power user, or you simply like having as much backed up in the cloud as possible, then you might have taken advantage of Google's paid plans. These storage-boosting options can increase your available storage by up to a huge 10TB, making it perfect for anyone who needs a huge amount of reliable, cloud-based storage.

Computing

The latest version of MacOS now supports storing your messages in Apple’s cloud

latest macos high sierra stores messages in icloud mac

The latest version of MacOS High Sierra is out, and with it arrives support for Messages in iCloud. Apple's update arrives just days after the release of iOS 11.4 for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch that introduced the same feature. You can now essentially store all messages and related attachments in Apple's cloud, which automatically appear on all of your Apple devices if logged into the same iMessages account.
To activate this feature in MacOS, open the Messages app and navigate to Messages > Preferences > Accounts > Enable Messages in iCloud.
To activate this feature on iOS, open the Settings app and navigate to [your name] > iCloud > Enable Messages in iCloud.
When turned on, this feature will allow you to read all messages sent from all Apple devices no matter if it’s a MacBook or an iPhone X. That also means if you delete a message, it's gone for good: There's no backup stored on your other Apple devices.
According to Apple, this cloud-based feature aims to free up space on your devices. But there's a drawback: Your messages are stored in Apple's cloud. Thus, if a hacker breaks into your iCloud account, theoretically he/she will have access to your private messages and attachments. But don't worry -- Apple says your messages are encrypted from end to end.
Outside the new Messages in iCloud feature, MacOS High Sierra 10.13.5 improves "stability, performance, and security." Also on the short list are two changes for the enterprise: Variables in SCEP payloads that now expand properly, and a fix for configuration profiles containing a Wi-Fi payload and SCEP payload. Apple provides a second security-based list of notes here.
To get the latest version of MacOS, open the App Store, click on the Updates button at the top, and wait a moment for the app to catch up with Apple. If you don't see High Sierra 10.13.5, you might need to install incremental security updates before Apple pushes the latest High Sierra build to your device.
MacOS High Sierra 10.13.5 arrives just days before Apple's developer conference next week. We expect to see iOS 12 along with ARKit 2.0, the company's platform for augmented reality apps served up on iOS. Other platforms expected to make an appearance include Watch OS 5, tvOS 12, and possibly MacOS 10.14.
Apple is also expected to spend time discussing how it will bring iOS and MacOS closer together without combining the two platforms. If anything, Messages for iCloud does just that: it brings a unified messaging experience to MacBooks and iPhones alike. Apple CEO Tim Cook even previously said customers don't want iOS and MacOS merged into one platform.
Meanwhile, what you may not see during the show are new devices, as the conference will supposedly focus strictly on software, not new software running on new hardware. Apple's MacBook portfolio isn't expected to receive an upgrade until late 2018 -- the same timeframe Apple will likely introduce its next iPhone(s) and MacBook Air laptops.