.Mac madness

I am using .Mac. It was time to renew the payment and as far as I know I was not notified. If you go into the Preference panel it will say how many days that remains on the subscription, but after setting up the service, why would you go in there? It should just be doing its thing. When the subscription is about to end it should notify me on boot with a clear popup.

Ok, so it is just a matter of getting the VISA card ready and renew. No problem? Well, not quite.
Even if .Mac remembers my username, password and address, after renewing it will treat me as a NEW member. This means all my data is lost! I have all the data on both my macs, but when the sync process starts on them it will look at the .Mac server and just remove stuff! I think I have seen a warning when it is adding/removing a lot of entries to the Keychain and Addressbook, but the data on my synced iDisk was just silently DELETED.

Luckily I had one file opened so I realized it in time. I could go into the second mac and change it to overwrite the content on .Mac from this machine. But I am a software engineer. What about someone like my mother? User friendly? Not really.

.Mac is a lousy, overpriced service. The only reason I pay for it is that it is the only stable solution to keep my macs in sync. Now I start to question if that last feature is worth paying €100 for yearly…