Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Remote Backups to Network Attached Storage


The Idea


The idea here is that you have a NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive that you’re using for Time Machine backups, like the setup I outlined in my “Using an AirPort Extreme and External Hard Drive as a Time Capsule” tutorial. Maybe you have a desktop at home, and a notebook that you travel with, and you’d like to continuously back them up to the same drive using Time Machine. I’ve seen other tutorials using Mobile Me / Back To My Mac to set this up, but I had no success with that approach. This is a pretty simple (not to mention FREE) way to achieve remote backups.

Requirements

Any Mac running OS X 10.5.x, an AirPort Extreme and your favorite USB external hard drive. For my setup, I’m using an Intel iMac and pre-unibody MacBook, an 802.11n AirPort Extreme w/ Gigabit Ethernet and a Western Digital 500GB My Book Studio Edition.

Setup

1) The first thing I recommend is setting yourself up with a free OpenDNS account. See www.opendns.com for info. I also recommend downloading the OpenDNS Updater and putting it in your Login Items.


2) Next, set up a free Dynamic DNS account. This will give you a memorable URL to access your home network, rather than keeping up with an ever-changing IP address. www.dyndns.com

3) If you have a dynamic IP address, you will also want to install the DynDNS widget on a machine that doesn’t leave your local network. This will ensure that your DynDNS account always has the correct IP address. If you have a static IP address, you can skip this step. If you don’t know if your IP address is static or dynamic, it is most likely dynamic.


4) Launch AirPort Utility. Choose your AirPort Extreme and click “Manual Setup.” Under the AirPort pane, click the “Base Station” tab.


5) Click on the “Edit” button under the “AirPort Extreme Name” field. In the resulting window, check the “Use dynamic global hostname” box. In the “Hostname” field, enter the URL (with no http:// or www) that you just created. In the user and password fields, enter your DynDNS account name and password. It should look like the following example, only with your info in the fields instead of “example.”


From here on, you will need to perform these steps on whatever machine you plan on backing up remotely. In most cases this will be your notebook. If you haven’t done so already, I recommend doing your first backup of this computer locally as it will take quite some time. It is recommended that you quit all open applications before performing the following steps.

6) In Finder, under the Go menu, click on “Connect to Server.” Type in afp://example.dyndns.org, using your own URL. If you are prompted for a user name and password, use the same credentials that you used to set up your hard drive access in AirPort Utility.


7) Once the server has mounted, you can go into the Time Machine pane in System Preferences and select the drive. It will show up in the dialog box as “Hard Drive Name (example.dyndns.org).”


8) You’re going to want the computer to mount the server automatically on startup, that way Time Machine is still “set it and forget it.” In System Preferences, go into the Accounts pane. Click on the Login Items tab, then drag and drop the hard drive’s icon into the list. I prefer to have the “Hide” box checked to make this whole process run in the background.


9) Your final step is to connect to a different network and test your new backup configuration!


Bonus Features

When your hard drive is mounted, you have read/write access to everything on the drive, so in addition to backups, you also have a large file server at your disposal.

You can forward port 5900 to a machine on your local network, and then use a VNC client (such as Chicken of the VNC) to remotely access your home machine. For example, I can access my iMac at home using my MacBook any time I’m connected to the internet.

Caveats

Keep in mind, you are limited by the download speed of your home internet connection, and (more importantly) the upload speed of your remote connection. This means that your backup speed will be significantly slower than when on your local network. For this reason, I do not recommend using this method for your first backup.

Remember that you are submitting non-encrypted data through the internet, and there is the chance it could be intercepted by a 3rd party. I would not recommend backing up sensitive data through this method.

It is very important that you have password protection not only on your hard drive, but also any machine attached to your network. Also, this should go without saying, but don’t go giving out your URL.

Other Notes

It does not appear to be necessary to change your backup disk to the local volume when connected to your local network. I have had no trouble backing up through this method while on my home network, and it appears to be taking advantage of local network speeds when doing so.

The backup process spends more time on preparing than usual. This appears to be normal for this situation.

I have not tested this functionality with a Time Capsule, but I don’t believe it will work. If anyone would like to try and report their results, I would love to add them to this tutorial.

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