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Time Machine Remote Backup: How do I do this?

T

timswim78

Diamond Member
I have a Mac at home. I would like to use Time Machine to backup my files to a linux server at a relative's house.

For the sake of bandwidth, there are a few things that I would like to do:
1. Do the initial backup at my house. Since the initial backup would be 200+GB (I shoot photos in RAW), I would like to not surpass my bandwidth cap. Also, it would take a long, long time to transfer that much stuff over standard broadband connections. Supplemental backups should be no more than 1GB or so per week.
2. Be able to connect and disconnect the network drive/share on command. This will keep Time Machine from eating up time and bandwidth with hourly backups. (Although I guess that turning Time Machine on and off would have the same effect).

What do I need to do, to set this up?

I am guessing that I will need to:
1. Setup a share on the linux server. (Not sure how to do this, but I am sure that I can figure it out with some research).
2. Connect my Mac to that share, mapped as a network drive. (How do I do this securely)?
3. Point Time Machine to the network drive, using a method like this. http://www.somelifeblog.com/2009/02/fixed-time-machine-backup-to-network.html

Any other thoughts? Is there a better solution for doing incremental backups over the Internet?

Thanks!
 
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I do something similar, though not with time machine currently. I have an openfiler system setup at my house and a second openfiler configured at my parents house.

I use rsync to mirror both openfilers to each other. The problem with this method for timemachine is that rsync would see the time machine sparsebundle change, and need to resend the entire sparsebundle. I'm not sure how to get around that, maybe have to use something more sophisticated like drbd to do the replication?

for my setup I use 2 linksys routers with ddwrt running a vpn between both houses, so I am able to send data securely
 
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There's a discussion of a similar setup here.

According to the top answer:

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"The ideal solution is to create a sparsebundle image and to sync that. This can be most easily done by sharing the drive over the network and pointing Time Machine to it and starting a fresh backup.

The reason to do this is because a sparsebundle stores its data spread over a collection of files (8MB 'bands'). If you have a sparsebundle, you can rync it to the remote server, and rsync can just transfer the bands that have changed. With Time Machine, you typically just append onto the end, so you'll only usually be syncing the last few bands up.

Once a given band is full and OS X creates another one, the now-full band won't be written to anymore. It gets copied up one last time, and never touched again. The new band gets copied every time rsync is run until it too fills up and stops being written to."
------------

If true, this sounds like it would work pretty well for what you need.

Personally, I don't think there's a way to get TimeMachine to backup directly to a remote server (I could be wrong) but backing up the sparsebundle file sounds like a great solution, especially if only new data is transfered.

I use TimeMachine to backup to a Linux NAS on my LAN using a sparsebundle image, but I've never backed up that to a remote server.
 
Great replies guys. THanks!

Since I am backing up multiple drives, excluding file types, excluding directories, etc. I am not sure that the sparesebundle image will work.

With that in mind, I think that I will try RSYNC, as that is what I was using for local backups, prior to Time Machine. I had never heard of openfiler before, but I am reading up on it now.

Any suggestions for setting up a secure connection between a 10.6 iMac and a Linux box over the Internet?
 
You'd be investing a lot of time, if not a lot of money, in a solution that will almost certainly not 'just work'. TM on a remote network is pretty much out of the question for starters due to reliability issues, and rsync of sparsebundles also has plenty of opportunities for problems.

Embrace the Fisher-Price: Carbonite, Mozy, iBackup, etc.
 
vbuggy said:
You'd be investing a lot of time, if not a lot of money, in a solution that will almost certainly not 'just work'. TM on a remote network is pretty much out of the question for starters due to reliability issues, and rsync of sparsebundles also has plenty of opportunities for problems.

Embrace the Fisher-Price: Carbonite, Mozy, iBackup, etc.
Click to expand...

+1 .... by far the best advice
 
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