Posts Tagged ‘backup’

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

A Flowchart To Live By

Whether you’re transferring pictures from your camera to your computer of the last family gathering or transferring hundreds of gigabytes of client data, data is very important. You can always reinstall and reconfigure your applications, but its those data files that are important. I always hate to lose data, but unfortunately, sometimes I lose track of what I’m doing and delete the wrong thing. Sure, there’s always last night’s backups (right?!), but things may have changed in between. Since every once in a while I get power hungry at the command line and let myself become an idiot, I thought I’d share the things I’ve learned in the form of a flowchart. This pretty much sums up everything I’ve learned in life so far:

Follow the flowchart very carefully.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Jan 6th, 2009

An Important Reminder

Please, if you don’t already have a backup in place for your computer, do so today. Don’t wait until tomorrow. I was reminded again last night when the hard drive in my MacBook (my main computer) died. Immediately, I logged in to Mozy and there were all of my pictures and documents. It’s a free service (up to 2GB) and takes only minutes to setup. I’ve been on the other end of this plenty of times before, having to tell people that they’ve lost everything, but never on the receiving end. The good news is I didn’t lose anything important, but very well could have. If I would have lost anything it would have been my own fault given that I’m a systems administrator by trade, but sometimes the ones closest to it forget that it can happen to ourselves. Please, take a few minutes to either double-check that you are backed up and can restore your files or take the time to get a system in place. You can use built-in OS tools to backup to an external hard drive or machine across your network, or you can sign up for an online backup service such as Mozy. If you have more than 2GB of critical data, you can sign up an unlimited home account for only $4.95 a month. A very cheap price to ensure your pictures and documents are not lost. Whatever you do, make data that cannot be bought back a prioirty. I used to be worried about my music, but when it came down to it I can go buy my music back if I want, but not my pictures. We all know that hard drives are ticking time bombs if we rely upon one to store our data, but I just wanted to give a friendly reminder to everyone. :)

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (2) : Oct 11th, 2008