Why isn't .Mac offering unlimited online backup?

People cheered when Apple upped the storage on its .Mac service from 1 GB to 10 GB, and rightly so. The company wants us to not only store important stuff on .Mac, but share our photos and movies as well – and those functions dig into storage like Elvis into fried chicken.

A spacious 10 GB will let you store lots of data, but there's one big, glaring need it won't take care of: backing up your computer itself.

Say, for the moment, that .Mac's companion Backup application were a reliable, thorough, easy-to-use tool for backing things up to your .Mac iDisk. (It's not, but let's say it is.) Sure, you can stash plenty of important stuff in your 10 GB, but all of your work files? With room left over for your entire iPhoto library and iTunes collection? These personal items alone may consume many times the space of a .Mac account's storage.

Competitors are stepping in. Take a look at Mozy, whose MozyHome service offers full online backup of one computer for $4.95 per month. There may be some storage limit in the fine print, but on the surface, it looks like Mozy is offering something .Mac doesn't – without other .Mac features, sure, but at a lower price too.

It might not be hard for .Mac to offer the same service. Here's what would be great to see:

1) Time Machine continues to work as it currently does, backing up entire computers to local external drives. But in addition, Apple adds the ability to make Time Machine backups bootable.

2) .Mac, in addition to its 10 GB of freely-usable storage and other benefits, includes backup via syncing for one Mac's Users directory.

There. What've we got? Bootable Time Machine drives give us a 100% complete backup and restoration solution – full peace of mind for restoring a Mac that dies.

Yet the Time Machine drive itself could die too (think fire and flood!), which is where the .Mac online backup comes in. True, only the Users directory is backed up there, but it'd be more practical to restore the OS and applications from their original discs anyway, not via online restoration. (For now, that is; the MacBook Air may be pointing to a future in which online restoration makes sense for everything.)

So if you lose both your Mac and your Time Machine drive, you reinstall your system and apps (or get a new Mac), and let .Mac restore all user data. That's good enough, considering the dire circumstances! The important thing: you're covered on all bases. There'd really be no excuse for losing data.

Final ideas:

3) Back to My Mac – assuming it works in the future – is linked to the same .Mac backup of user data described above; no need to back up user data twice!

4) Apple drops the clunky .Mac Backup application, and incorporates its functionality into Time Machine.

5) Should the .Mac backup of user data be a static snapshot, or an ongoing journal of changes, a la Time Machine? If the latter, Apple has to set some firm limit on storage space, but it'd be a wonderful thing if you can find past versions of your documents online. If you're traveling, you won't have access to your Time Machine drive that stores those old file versions...

Complete solution?

Full backup of user data – what a fantastic incentive to buy .Mac not just once, but for every Mac you use!

The above is a quick brainstorm with all the hard thinking left undone, but I'd like to think that Apple is putting some thought into the possibility (even if just to clearly spell out why it wouldn't work).

PS: A miscellaneous kudo to Mozy: their documentation understands that "backup" is a noun and "back up" is a verb. Bravo! Apple can't seem to consistently grasp this simple distinction.