Posts Tagged ‘apple’

Easy and Free Network-based Time Machine Backup

I’ve been looking for a network-based (free) solution for backing up a couple of Macs using Time Machine at home for some time. Plugging external drives into our two Macs was doable, but not exactly convenient. There’s plenty of how-tos out there on setting up a Linux machine to offer up an AFP share and then hacking it to support Time Machine, but those seemed more like a hack to me and users reported mixed luck. I needed something that ‘just worked’. Enter: FreeNAS.

I actually was setting up and playing with FreeNAS after reading about it on an article from MaximumPC. I’d set it up before and played with it, but I didn’t quite realize how much progress they had made. When playing with the AFP settings, I ran across the Time Machine option in the interface.

Setting up Time Machine to backup to your FreeNAS is pretty straight forward. First, you’ll want to start with a base install of FreeNAS with enough space to hold your backups. There’s plenty of good how-to’s out there including the one I mentioned earlier, so I don’t really see a point in me covering it here.

First, you’ll want to enable AFP on the server. You just have to simply go to Services -> AFP in the interface, check the “Enable” check box on the far right, enable local user authentication, and click the “Save and Restart” button to turn AFP on.

auto-disk-discovery-time-machine

Next, you’ll need to add a user. In the interface menu, go to Access -> Users and Groups. Add a user and call it what you like.

Now, hop back to the AFP management and click on the Shares tab. Add a share. When you add the share, be sure to add your user as a user that can read and write to the share as well as enable automatic disk discovery and set the discovery mode to “Time Machine”. Once finished, be sure to click the “Apply changes” button (a step I’ve missed a time or two :) ).

On my Mac, I had to authenticate to the AFP server once in Finder. Then, go into the Time Machine preferences and you should be able to add your new share as a Time Machine disk. I’d suggest making sure that you plug into a wired network for the first backup if you normally wander around with your Mac on wireless.

So far it’s working pretty solidly and was simple to setup. In my case, the whole thing was free as I am running it in VMware on a machine that would be on anyway.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Dec 8th, 2009

Upgrade to Windows 7 Because.. It Sucks Less?

Well, after a busy couple of months I’m finally back. I did miss the release of Windows 7 on my blog, but I definitely enjoyed watching the fireworks between Apple and Microsoft through their commercials on tv. Microsoft has definitely come out with a product that the public seems to like (which ultimately is all that matters). One of the commercials, however, caught me a bit off guard.

In the commercial, ‘Angela’ says: “I don’t want to worry about my computer freezing or crashing … and suddenly, Windows 7″. Uh, what? Did we just hear an admission from Microsoft that Vista had problems? I hate to add to my anti-Microsoft list of blog posts, but seriously, what are they thinking with this ad? They should’ve just said: “Upgrade to Windows 7, it sucks less than previous versions”. Definitely not the positive spin on Windows that I was expecting.. With a product out the door that the company can definitely be proud of, I expected them to tout some cool new features, but that’s not the stance we’ve seen from previous versions.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (3) : Nov 4th, 2009

Why No Camera On the New iPod Touch?

Today Apple gave its iPod lineup a bit of a refresh with a new version of the iPhone firmware, iPod Touches with larger capacity and a slick new Nano with a camera. The iPod Nano looks pretty slick with its new camera, YouTube/Facebook publishing, and various other new fun features. So slick that I’m thinking that I want one and I don’t really get excited about devices all that much. Problem is, I’d like to run apps and have WiFi.. So I need a Touch.. doh!

I really don’t get it. As far as I understand, they were able to add the camera to the Nano without adding any width to the device. I’m sure there’s reasons that they can’t add the camera without adding width, but I’d gladly sacrifice a little bit of width if I gained a camera. Besides, the iPhone has it. Now Apple’s going to have to come up with some crazy chart like the Windows 7 product comparison chart to decide which model to buy..

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Sep 10th, 2009

The $10 Free App

I don’t think it’s fair to talk about my Snow Leopard experience this weekend without talking about the hosing I took from the iTunes App Store this weekend. A coworker of mine and Digg both told me about the new Facebook app for the iPhone. My wife uses Facebook incessantly and I thought that she would be excited about it, but she never said a word. When I asked her about it she checked for updates on her iPod Touch and it said there were none.

Not one to give up easily, I checked the article that was posted on Digg and found out that others had had problems with their devices finding the update and the recommendation was to remove and reinstall to get the new version. So.. we quickly removed the old Facebook app and went to install the new one. Sadly, we were disappointed (more like she was mad and I was in trouble..) to find out that it required the iPhone 3.0 upgrade (her iPod was a gen 2 without the upgrade). Since the iTunes App Store is so closed and wont’ allow to get the older version, Facebook 3.0 did end up being the $10 free app for us..

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 1st, 2009

The Difference Between an Apple and Microsoft Upgrade

Like a good little Apple fan, I went out and purchased a copy of the new Snow Leopard OS from my local Mac store yesterday. I got it home, popped open the box, popped the DVD into my MacBook, told it to upgrade and in 45 minutes or so I was playing with the new features of Snow Leopard. This really was my first operating system upgrade as an Apple fan and I have to say I was impressed. I was an Apple fan before the Leopard release, but I didn’t do an in-place upgrade for other reasons at the time.

Why is this cool or even worth noting? Because that was all I did. I didn’t look at some chart to see which copy of Snow Leopard was right for my computer. I didn’t have to double-check that I was running the 32-bit version instead of 64-bit. I didn’t run my computer and peripherals through some software to make sure they were compatible. All I cared about was that I had a MacBook running Leopard, so I purchased Snow Leopard and popped the DVD in the drive. And guess what? My computer now runs faster! In fact, I am now using something like 6 GB less disk space than before.

The other cool part was that I didn’t reinstall any software, nor did I re-activate anything. Unlike doing an upgrade with Microsoft software involved, I wasn’t treated like a pirate and required to jump through hoops to use my software again. I just loaded it again. The user experience from the store to upgrade complete was very smooth and straight-forward.

While it’s certainly true that the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard was far less of a jump than Windows XP to Vista or even Vista to 7, but it really doesn’t matter. I had to put far less care into the upgrade and just did it. And that (among a few other things) is why I do, and will continue to do for the foreseeable future, recommend Apple products to those who ask me their opinion on what computer to buy.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (4) : Aug 29th, 2009

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