Remote Mac??

Question

Hi,
I'd like to learn more about running a nightly remote backup of my hard drive to another hard drive. Can someone suggest a good way of doing this?
I want the security of knowing that my office work is safely backed up in a second location (i.e. my home office). I'd also like to be able to access my latest work files from that second location if I can't get to my office.
I thought a good external hard drive setup at my home office would work, but is this common? And how would I connect it to the internet? Would it need to be connected to a computer?
cheers

Answer 1

I think the average size file would be at most 10
megabytes.
What's most important is the TOTAL size of what you want to back up or maintain copies of.
The second question is, do you want something like Backup or iSync? They are rather different products.
If you want to automatically "mirror" some files on your home and work computers, with a change made either place reflected automatically on the other, that's iSync or something like it.
If you want archived backups, such as a "full" backup of a folder once, say monthly, and "incremental" backups of any file that's changed every day, that's Backup. If you change one file, say, every other day, then you'd have a copy of that file the way it looked every time it was changed, until you do another "full" backup and delete the previous stuff. Very helpful if you mess something up but don't realize it immediately (been there, done that!).
And you could combine the two, although that would likely be overkill, more complex, and probably not entirely automatic.
The dot-mac account includes 1gb of storage on Apple's server. You can buy more.
There are other services, some claiming to be free, that could be used similarly, but perhaps not as automatically and easily as iSync. They allow some storage free, and more for an extra cost.
So I think an automated backup over the
internet would be fine. But it would be great if I
didn't (a) have to pay for a .mac account, (b) lug
around and remember to connect/disconned a firewire
drive every day.
$99 a year really isn't much -- to protect how much stuff on how many $$ worth of computers? But yes, you really don't want to be moving an external drive like that.
I guess what I really don't know how to do is backup
to a remote hard drive over the internet.
I'd suggest you read up on dot-Mac, particularly Backup and iSync, and perhaps some of the competing products, to get a better idea of what you really want to do.
The main dot-Mac site is: http://www.apple.com/dotmac/
Maybe even use the (somewhat limited) free trial.