A preview of Bandwagon 2.0: right-click to backup to either your FTP or S3 account. BW 2.0 supports all file types and is more streamlined than BW 1.x.
If you want to help test, send us an email to beta@.
We moved our Wordpress blog to tumblr.
Thanks to Darshan Bavaria’s wp2tumblr, we got it done in a few minutes. He upgraded to version 1.3 to handle Disqus’ new commenting system.
Thanks DB!
Update2: Extended to August 31 September 30
Update: DreamHost has a blog post about it.
We are happy to announce that DreamHost and Bandwagon are running a month long promotion (until July August 31) that gives existing DH customers a free one-year Bandwagon account and Bandwagon customers a free one-year DreamHost Level 1 account.
To avail of the free DH account, a Bandwagon customer must do the following:
New customers:
* Purchase Bandwagon (important: use dh101 as your coupon code when purchasing)
* Mention this offer on your blog, twitter or pownce account plus post us a trackback or comment on this blog post
Existing customers:
* Just mention this offer on your blog, twitter or pownce account plus post us a trackback or comment on this blog post
Once you complete the tasks above, send an email to dh at ridethebandwagon dot com and we will verify you as a customer. We will then send the DreamHost coupon code worth $119.40 within 24 to 48 hours.
Let Bandwagon bask in the glory of 148GB of free DreamHost space :)
Enjoy Bandwagoners!
After internal testing (to our MediaTemple ftp account), we are happy to announce the availability of Bandwagon FTP edition. For those that don’t know, Bandwagon is an app service that automatically and continuously backs up iTunes to your online storage. Furthermore, Bandwagon is event driven, not scheduled backup (i.e. when you add tracks, it will automatically back it up).
We have an Amazon S3 edition called Bandwagon DIY (which has been renamed to Bandwagon S3) which, of course, backs up to your S3 storage.
Bandwagon FTP is geared towards users that have unused web hosting storage or have their own homegrown ftp server (revive those old x86s!).
Bandwagon features:
* simple and elegant UI
* backup and restore across unlimited Macs
* sync across unlimited Macs (future feature)
* unlimited installs on your Macs
* use of S3 and FTP editions (for one price, $24/year)
We don’t recommend that you run both editions simultaneously but you can use either one during your subscription period. We have a 30 day free trial (no credit card required). Screenshots here.
For bloggers
Get a free 6 month account by doing the following:
* Link to this post from your blog
* Place a trackback or comment to this post
* Disclose that you will be getting a free 6 month account
This blogger promotion applies to new users only. We will send you a 6-month coupon code within 24 hours.
Updated (from March 1 original post)
We understand that most people see desktop software as a standalone entity and thus should be charged a one-time fee. We agree. However, Bandwagon is NOT just desktop software.
The following reasons should clarify the pricing issues:
1) iTunes metadata is stored on our servers (Amazon EC2 and S3) and updated when changed. Examples:
This important feature is currently available on DIY and DIY+. It begs the question then “Why not just store the metadata on S3?”. S3 is simply a file storage system and we need database processing server side to maintain the metadata, which S3 cannot provide.
If you don’t need this feature, then Bandwagon is probably not the right product for you.
2) Features are in the works (nothing is final) that integrate syncing and sharing to both DIY and DIY+ application services which require server-side processing and connections. Examples:
If you still feel that the reasons above does not satify you forking over your hard-earned money, we understand. Here’s a list of stand-alone tools that might work for you.
So think of Bandwagon not so much as an expense but as a time-saver in the very boring world of backup. You can either save $2 per month or save oodles of time. I think your time is more important, especially to geeks.
Note: beinsync provides a not-too dissimilar backup + sync application service for music, photos + documents for the Windows platform. They charge $60/year. beinsync uses your other computer’s hard drives to backup though, not an online storage cloud (although they recently included S3 support). Bandwagon DIY cost 60% less.
Bandwagon DIY is a BYOS (bring-your-own-storage) iTunes backup solution. We currently support S3 with other storage clouds coming soon (ftp, Omnidrive, Streamload, etc.).
Bandwagon can best be described as the “Whole Foods of Backup”, specialized and not for everyone.
Our customer typically has the following characteristics:
While I can describe the features, it’s best to leave it to the screenshots. Also, read about our iTunes metadata backup methodoly.
For those that have been testing, please perform a software update.
Buy it for $24 per year. You can download v1.00 here.
Oh, one more thing, we have removed the 5 Mac limit to unlimited installs for the same price.
Note: while we have been beta testing, this is the initial production release so it won’t be perfect. Here’s an early review.
Update: here’s another review.
A cabinent in an apartment that we stayed at while coding the early version of Bandwagon.
(And yeah, that’s Absinthe!)
On one of our earlier posts, we considered the possibility of using GMail as a storage platform using libgmail. One of the issues is of course attachment size (besides possible TOS issues). Increasing the attachment size to 20MB does not actually help us substantially because we would still face the possibility of chunking items > 20MB. Most music items are less than 10MB to begin with and most movies/tv shows/music videos are greater than 20MB so status quo still rules the day.
So what’s the point of this post? A reminder that we still want to incorporate GMail as one of our storage clouds. Let us know if anyone is interested in helping us code this feature.
[via]
One of Bandwagon’s main objectives besides backup and syncing is the ability to centralize all of your iTunes items on your online storage. This allows customers with multiple Macs and multiple iTunes libraries to “share + sync”.
Example: My wife has an iBook. My dad has an iMac. I have a PowerBook. We all have different libraries and we all recommend music to each other. With bandwagon installed on all 3 Macs, I can search for what is on my wife’s and on my dad’s Macs and download what songs I want. Under DIY+, I will be able to sync playlists among all Macs. From their perspective, they will be able to search what I have.
All of this runs seemlessly in the background and doesn’t take additional setup or work. You just install Bandwagon and it’s all there. Btw, my wife and I are currently in Manila, Philippines and my dad resides in Silicon Valley.
The downside (as of the moment) is we only allow one Amazon S3 account for each Bandwagon account, which supports up to 5 Macs, which means that my wife and my dad would have to use my S3 account as well.
If you are in a similar situation, Bandwagon provides a pain-less and simple solution.