One of Leopard’s “big new features” is a feature for those .Mac members who got suckered into spending $100/year for Apple’s suite of services which probably are only worth about $50/year, if that much. It has to do with the Finder’s improved sharing features (file sharing, screen sharing, etc.), and it’s called Back to My Mac.

Back to My Mac is a feature that lets you connect to your computers over the internet in a similar fashion to how you can connect to computers that are on your network. In the part of the Finder sidebar marked “SHARED”, your home computers that have been configured to work with Back to My Mac (setup in your .Mac Preferences pane) will pop up alongside any sharable computers on the network. Supposedly, even though the computer is not on the local network, you can connect to it as though it is via the internet and use it like any other shared computer–via file sharing or via screen sharing.

However, Back to My Mac doesn’t automatically “put” your computer on the internet; the ability for you to be able to connect to the files of another computer on the internet already exists, and with Leopard building in VNC (which is what powers the Screen Sharing), it is indeed already possible to connect to any computer over the internet, provided you have the username and password. The difficult part is that you need to know the computer’s IP address, and most of us have dynamic IP address that change on a regular basis, depending on our ISP. What .Mac does in Back to My Mac is it actually tracks what IP address your computers have at any given time, and so if you want to use Back to My Mac to connect to them, .Mac can supply Finder with your computer’s current IP address so that the Finder can seamlessly connect to it.

However, because of this, Back to My Mac is has the same limitations of file sharing and screen sharing on your local network. Apple loves to give the example of you being at work on your laptop and realizing that you need something on your desktop computer at home. Well, in order to access it on Back to My Mac, you need to have signed up for a $100/year .Mac account, your computer needs to be on (it cannot be turned off), your computer needs to be awake (it cannot be on sleep), and your computer needs to be connected to the internet. In other words, you need to be an anti-environmentalist who is willing to leave their computer on all the time, wasting electricity, in the off chance that you might need something off your computer.

Or, here’s a better idea: Since you’re already a .Mac member, why don’t you just put that important file on your iDisk and not worry about it?

In short, Back to My Mac may sound like a cool feature, but in practical reality, it’s really not that useful and not that radical, and it doesn’t help that it’s only available as part of the overpriced .Mac suite. After doing quite a bit of research on how Back to My Mac works (since I don’t currently have .Mac), I can say that I’m certainly not impressed with it.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: Back to My Mac, file sharing, Finder, iDisk, internet, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, network, review, Screen Sharing