Apple’s .Mac suite of Internet services was upgraded this morning, just before the early adopters’ annual subscriptions come up for renewal. In a nutshell, the enhancements are: a bump in disk space, from 250 MB to 1 GB; Backup 3.0, with incremental backups and backup plans; and a new Groups feature.

I’m already making use of Backup 3.0: I bought a 160-gigabyte external FireWire drive for backup and extra storage last week; I figured that data loss was not something I could cope with. Version 3 is definitely an improvement, especially with the automated plans. It’ll be a lot easier to back up my data like a good boy.

As for Groups — well, it’s something I’d like to use, but it’s much more limited than other social-networking services. Private, invitation-only, and needs a trial Mac.com account. There’s probably a use for this, but its niche is not yet obvious to me. Must ponder.