Chatting with friends last week about MobileMe made me realize that many people do not use the MobileMe iDisk features to their full extent. Of course, Apple hasn't been advertising some of the features as particularly valuable for MobileMe users. However, in the past, some of these features were the reasons many people chose .Mac over other online services. In this article, I'll highlight some of the lesser known features of MobileMe, especially the features that relate specifically to using an iDisk from the Finder. I won't discuss features that are scheduled to be discontinued in October or the web-based MobileMe applications in this article.

iDisk on Your Desktop

Did you know that you can have a copy of your iDisk mounted on your Desktop even when you're not connected to the Internet? This can be very useful if you want to copy documents, music or video files or complete websites from your hard drive to the iDisk and vice versa.

To store a local copy of your iDisk on your Desktop, connect to the Internet, open System Preferences, select MobileMe, and then select the iDisk tab. Click the "Start" button at the bottom of the pane to turn on iDisk syncing. In a few minutes, you should see an icon for your iDisk on your Desktop and in your Finder sidebar. As soon as your iDisk finishes syncing, you'll be able to use it like you would use an extra hard drive.

Backup

Open up your iDisk and you will see that it contains several folders, including one named "Backup." Apple provides all MobileMe users with a free and good backup application called Backup. You can find the application in the Software folder on your iDisk. Backup can be used to make incremental backups of files and folders on your hard drive and you can store these backups on a hard disk or, for offsite protection, in the Backup folder of your iDisk.

Websites

Your iDisk has two locations for storing websites you create with a web design program or with an HTML editor. If you use iWeb, you've probably been using iWeb's built-in "Publish" option to export your websites to the Web folder on your iDisk. However, this is not necessarily the best or quickest way to publish a website.

If you have a website that has been publishing very slowly or with errors, you might want to try a little experiment. Instead of publishing your website to your MobileMe account, publish it to a folder on your hard drive. Next, copy the contents of the published folder to the Sites folder on your iDisk. The URL for your new website will be http://homepage.mac.com/[your MobileMe username].

At this time, it is not clear from Apple if the Sites folder will continue to be functional after October, but it is my guess that you will still be able to add and remove sites from this folder.

Documents, Pictures, Music, and Videos

The Documents folder on your iDisk is the perfect place for storing offsite copies of data you can't afford to lose. Just drop files or folders into the folder and, if necessary, sync your local and virtual iDisks manually, and your files will be safely stored in a remote location.

The Pictures, Music and Movie folders let you easily store photos and music and video files on the remote server. I like to keep a photo of myself that I use for my online profile on forums in my iDisk Pictures folder because it's easy to find and access whenever I need to upload the photo.

As you can see, MobileMe provides much more than just the cloud and online syncing that Apple has been advertising. So, mount your iDisk and start exploring it and see what a great value MobileMe really is. For $99, you get offline storage space, a useful backup application, a web hosting service, and an easy-to-use syncing application. Unfortunately, most of these wonderful services will disappear next June when Apple discontinues MobileMe.