Apple’s new US Patent 7,120,785 “describes a ‘method and apparatus rendering user accounts portable’, whereby a user account can be stored to an external storage device and moved to another computer,” Simon Aughton reports for PC Pro.
‘The multi-user computer system, eg. through its operating system, locates user accounts not only in local storage of the multi-user computer system, but also in any removable data storage attached to the multi-user computer system,’ the patent says. ‘Hence, by coupling the external, portable data store to another multi-user computer, a user is able to login to any supporting multi-user computer and be presented with their user configuration and user directory.’ The patent goes on to explain that the user account may be stored alongside general data storage or ‘other functionality’.
Full article here.
“Home on iPod” finally coming soon? It would make sense with flash-based iPod capacity growing (those tiny hard drives on older and full size iPods aren’t really designed to perform as “Home on iPod” would require).
Hopefully, the cut-at-the-last-minute “Home on iPod” Mac OS X 10.3 Panther feature will show up in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. MacRumors has a cached page of Apple.com’s long-lost mention of the feature for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther:
Home away from home
Ever thought you could carry your home in the palm of your hands or in your pocket? You can. Panther’s Home on iPod feature lets you store your home directory – files, folders, apps – on your iPod (or any FireWire hard drive) and take it with you wherever you go. When you find yourself near a Panther-equipped Mac, just plug in the iPod, log in, and you’re “home,” no matter where you happen to be. And when you return to your home computer, you can synchronize any changes you’ve made to your files by using File Sync, which automatically updates offline changes to your home directory.
Related articles:
RUMOR: 4G iPod to include video capabilities, ‘Home on iPod’ – May 13, 2004
Migo Personal for iPod announced, take your Windows PC settings with you in your iPod – October 05, 2004
I will have to ditch my Partridge Family music collection to make room on my iPod for this. <sigh>
Nice, thatd be useful seen as im running out of space on my iBook hard drive – pity I just ordered a 100gig one to stick in it.
I’v ebeen begging this comapny to port it to the Mac
http://www.migosoftware.com/
Now all Apple needs is to open up MacOS as a REAL multi-user system. Plug that iPod into a Mac and have a seat in front of the 2nd monitor/keyboard/mouse and use it WHILE SOMEONE ELSE IS USING THEIR ACCOUNT on the primary monitor/keyboard/mouse.
Think of that for a sec. Two people in adjacent cubicles, or two people in the same house, using the same Mac at the same time. OK, so Apple needs to charge a little more for the OS that supports that cause it’s gonna cut into their profits a bit, selling one less Mac here & there. They could make it so if two users were active that no one user could hog all the cores if they were doing something intensive.
I’d pay $300 more for it. Would would you pay?
What is the simplest way to have a bootable backup of my Hard Drive? I do know about Carbon Copy Cloner which I scanned through the instructions, but it seemed a little hard to do. Any advise?
Reviving the old “Home on iPod” rumors from the pre-Panther days? Ahhhh, the memories!
errrr .. MojoPac?
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/software/mojopac-pc-on-a-stick-or-an-ipod-202724.php
Wingsy,
Interesting idea and I think may be feasible from a hardware standpoint quite soon. I could certainly see dual core – dual processor systems being able to handle this. I doubt that this is coming in Leopard. 10.6 maybe???
Mac4lfe,
Post your email address and I can send you some directions.
How will this work if all new iPods are USB and no longer Firewire? Can you boot from a USB iPod?
Mac4lfe pray your hard drive doesn’t nose-dive before Leopard is released.
“Mac Backitup”
I appreciate it. I’ve been so prductive with my Powerbook, I did not realize how much content I have acquired since I switched to Mac.
Where is that guy Neo when we need someone to tell us how it’s all connected — the new wireless iPods coming up, the iTV thingy, 1802.11n, HDMI connectivity in Apple devices, Big Screen TVs, Leopard, the iPhone, the re-birth of the Newton, endless new Apple Patents, Hollywood, the brilliant guy who writes Roughly Drafted, and the next generation of chips coming out from Intel, starting with the Santa Rosa platform — we now it’s all connected in a giant wave that will deliver us to the next iteration of the internet. Too bad Dennis Seller brainwashed Neo and took away his inspiration and his courage. We could have used his vision.
SuperDuper is a really easy way to back up your entire boot volume, including the home directory(directories).
The basic version is free, and an inexpensive registered copy unlocks several useful backup options beyond just replicating the entire disk.
My user folder is 37 gigs. Flash based iPods gonna have to get a whole lot bigger before that will fit alongside the 20 gigs I already have on mine…
Carbon Copy Cloner to me is one of the best,and probably the easiest, backup software ever invented. What’s the problem? Maybe we can help.
I would love to be able to plug in my iPod and see it as a log in user account at the Mac log in screen. Using the system and apps from my Mac, but user account on my iPod with a synchronised backup onto the Mac would be excellent.
I love the fact that the iPod automatically keeps a backup of my media without me thinking about it, so extending this to my Mac would mean not only portability, but background backups. If Time Machine backs up constantly to another drive, why not to an iPod?
i can’t wait for this feature, it’s something they should have done ages ago. now they just need to make it compatible with multiple macs (i have almost the same account on my iMac and macbook)
It would be cool if your nano WAS your computer, and all you needed to do was dock it at a station anywhere you go.
After all, the iPod is a small flash drive, that runs services necessary. If Apple was to create an OS X Mobile operating system, the possibilities would be endless.
Malthus, surely you can live without all 37 gigs of whatever you have in your home folder when you’re on-the-go. How about a synchronization feature that lets you choose a subset of your home folder, much like an iPod shuffle or nano works with large song collections? (Why carry a duplicate of your iTunes library that’s already on your iPod?) You would definiyely want your user library, but beyond that there’s probably a lot of stuff most people could leave behind.
In the near term, I think portable, bus-powered firewire drives are the thing to use for this feature.