I and my girlfriend each have an apple macbook. I will be staying here in Switzerland, while she will be spending lots of time in london for the next few months (and have access to a wifi network).

I currently use time machine with an external hard drive which i plug intermittently into my macbook to do backups.

1) Is it possible for her to remotely backup her data in the same way somehow? Is this possible with time machine? Would it be possible using Time Capsule?

2) Secondly, is it possible to share data with her machine remotely and wirelessly, if for example i have a file on my computer and want to transfer it to her computer?

krlock3

Think you can do that throuugh the "Sharing" option in Settings, I use it on my network to share folders between the macbook and the imac. Fairly sure it's possible to do over the web.

Might be an idea to set up a mobileme account and then use your webserver for sharing files. You can sign up for a free trial.

I'd setup a VPN for file sharing, although I guess there is an easier way of achieving the same in OSX.

all good suggestions.

With regard to file sharing, I messed around with file sharing and got halfway there on my own wifi network. Mobileme had crossed my mind actually. I will look further into that. If I could achieve a shared connection over the internet rather than just on my wifi network that would be great, but i remain unconvinced that it is possible. Otherwise, both having mobileme accounts would be costly and require more effort.

About the remote backup, this seems more difficult to achieve. I think we can live with just copying files over if we can sort the file sharing out properly. Then, when i do my backup, her most important documents will be safe.

I think remote backup remotely over wifi to time machine would a great tool though.

krlock3.

For file sharing, you could also investigate the Back To My Mac feature. I've read mixed reports on whether or not this works consistently, but when it does, it sounds like the kind of thing you need.

For remote backup, Time Machine could be tricky - there's an interesting post here about that. I'd look into the online possibilities, especially if it's not going to be a permanent solution. A quick Google will show you loads of these.

I notice that LogMeIn do one - they are excellent for remote screen sharing, so that might be worth a look. Not sure if it's free though, I'd doubt it.

It would be my first wish to use built in features of mac osx or mac hardware to achieve my aims.

It all needs to be simple and foolproof. I will let you know if i find out anything more.

Back to my mac seems to be the sort of thing im looking for, I will look more closely at that as well.

krlock3.

I backup our Macs with rsync over ssh to a server I have on the Internet. That's a one line command for which you can make a shortcut on the desktop or even schedule. First time might be slow as you'll have a large amount of data but next runs will be quick as rsync only transfers changed data.

Any server where you have ssh access to and where the rsync utility is available will do.

I used to use the Unison file synchronization program to synchronize changes in the files between my Windows/Linux laptop at home and the Linux desktop at work. The program allows file synchronization across different operating systems. I believe that it's faster than rsync for this purpose. However it's not suitable for simple transfer of files: scp or similar are better in this case.

Check out rsnapshot too (website down at time of posting, they are probably restoring from backup )

It uses rsync and makes hard links from each snapshot back to the original file if it's unchanged, basically you end up with several differential backups until it fills the disk then it overwrites the oldest one.

Check out SugarSync (www.sugarsync.com). Allows you to keep several PCs and Macs in Sync - even allows you to access the files from your iPhone. I've been trying it for a week now both at home and at work and I'm quite impressed. My wife loves it, too. It's pretty inexpensive, very easy to use and seems very reliable. They encrypt your data on their end and also keep a backup copy of your stuff (basic versioning) in case you deleted something and accidentally synced it across the network.

First Sync can take several hours, especially if you have a huge amount of data - after that it'll just sync single files which is very speedy.

peter

I made a mistake earlier, it was not filebox, but dropbox.

http://www.getdropbox.com/

I use it with other people here, we have tested it and it does exactly what and how it says. It just works. It's Beta ATM, but there are invites, I'll see if there are any available, you can sign up for a Beta account.

For online backup I use BackBlaze (www.backblaze.com). Runs completely automatically in the background whenever you have an internet connection (so it's great for travelers).

$50/year for unlimited storage and a 15-day free trial to see if you like it.

It plays very nice with Macs (I'm a Mac tech support guy and I see it work well on many client's machines).