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time machine back up to remote macs over lan and internet

BACK UP OFTEN!!!!

Now that I have my mac mini set up as my home server I also wanted to backup its system drive to preserve all the configuration. I have an Airport extreme basestation that has a 500GB hard drive hooked up to it. I have used it to back up my mac book pro over the air and it worked just fine. When I tried to select it as the backup drive for my mac mini the time machine preference pane would crash every time. So I played arround with it and it appears that time machine is now able to backup to any afp:// file server. It is important that you mount it using the following instructions and not just click on it in the finder. It appears that apple does something differently when using the shares in finder.

Setting up time machine with a remote destination

This is done by pressing command + K in finder and using OS X built in ability to connect to different file servers

connect to server

connect to server

You might get prompted for user name and password. Once connected the afp source shows up in your finder.

afp source

afp source

In my case that is the airport extreme base station called chrillo.Airport with the hard drive. This could also be another mac. Now head over to your time machine preferences and the click the change drive button.

remote time machine backup

remote time machine backup

As you can see it shows up with its Ip address. In my case I used the internal Lan IP

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 16:44 and is filed under home server, Tech Questions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. Andrew August 27, 2009 at 21:32

    Any way to do this with a Time Capsule and Back to my Mac?

    I had it running and backing up at one point, but now it doesn’t work.

    Any ideas?

  2. Christoph Peter August 27, 2009 at 21:37

    It’s kind of hard to tell with so little information, but this kind of stuff can go bad in a number of places. what error were you shown when it failed? did you connect to it over the internet? if you could describe your setup and tell a bit more in detail what you did maybe I can help, right now I can just guess that the internet connection was interrupted. what connection did you use?