How To Configure Your Laptop for Wireless Backups Using Time Machine
The greatest thing about Leopard is that you can configure your Mac laptop to backup wirelessly and transparently using Time Machine. You can wander around the world editing files, and your laptop will automatically back them up when you come home and connect to your wireless router, without you having to do anything.
You will need a second Mac or Linux box to host the remote backup. This takes five to ten minutes to set up and configure.
First, configure your remote backup machine. These instructions assume that you are using a Mac for this.
- Configure your remote backup machine with a static IP address
- Your backup machine must be connected to the same wireless router that your laptop will connect to when you are home
- My wireless router is set to assign IP addresses starting with 192.168.1.100, so I assigned my remote mac to use 192.168.1.23
- To assign an IP address manually while still using DHCP to get other network settings from your wireless router, go to System Preferences -> Network -> Airport -> Advanced -> TCP/IP and choose “Using DHCP with manual address”
- Configure AFP File Sharing under System Preferences -> Sharing
- Select the “File Sharing” checkbox. You should see a message that says “Others can access your computer at afp://192.168.1.23″, or something similar.
- Click the “+” button under “Shared Folders:”, and add the hard drive you want to store the backups to the list
- Click the “+” button under “Users:”. Create a user called “backup”. Give this user Read & Write permissions to the backup hard drive
Now, configure your laptop
- Mount the remote backup hard drive
- In the Finder, choose “Connect to Server…” under the Go menu
- Type afp://192.168.1.23 in for the server address
- When asked, log in using user “backup” and type in the password. Be sure to click “Remember password in my Keychain”
- Now, Configure Time Machine
- Choose System Preferences -> Time Machine
- Click “Choose Backup Disk”
- Choose the remote backup disk that you mounted using AFP
That’s it! The first time Time Machine backs up, it will be really slow. Just let it run overnight. All the following hourly backups will be very fast.
If you use your laptop in the standard, Apple-approved manner, then you can configure Time Machine to only backup your Users directory, which will save space and time. Let me know if you need more help!
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Tagged: backup , howto , Leopard , TimeMachine
