If it’s not the slick new Drobo, it’s Time Machine and SuperDuper! The latest tool is Apple’s own Time Capsule. For better backup, why not send Time Capsule to Las Vegas?

As strange as that may sound, it may be a very affordable, dependable solution to using Time Machine on your Mac, but keeping the backed up data somewhere else besides your home or office.

If your Mac’s files are valuable, then having a mere extra hard drive at home doesn’t do much in case of a catastrophic disaster such as a flood, tornado, earthquake, fire, or rampant mother-in-law anger. Hey, it happens.

A company in Las Vegas that runs a 24/7 data center started Mac mini Colocation almost as soon as the Mac mini hit the streets. Colocation means you send them your Mac mini, and they plug it into their data center, and you can access it remotely.

It’s like owning your own mini server, either Leopard or Leopard Server, whichever you choose. Isn’t it nice to have so many choices these days?

Your little Mac mini sits there securely in a remote data center, plugged into the internet, always accessible to you for file back ups, web server, email, whatever you want it to be, from about $35 a month, which isn’t a bad price considering that even a Mac mini is a pretty fast machine.

What does that have to do with Time Machine and Time Capsule, you ask? Everything. Time Capsule is about the size of a Mac mini. It holds either a 500 gig hard drive or a 1,000 gig hard drive, so you can back up your Mac wirelessly, or using Gigabit ethernet.

Hmmm. There’s that little overlooked trick. Gigabit ethernet. Your Mac can find Time Capsule in your home or office network, and Time Machine can do its back up magic. But there’s still that catastrophic back up insurance that’s missing.

So, move a Time Capsule to Mac mini Colocation and use Time Machine to backup files over the internet, from your Mac at home, to the Time Capsule sitting in a data center in Las Vegas.

Colocation means that a data center simply hooks up your Mac mini or Time Capsule in a big computer rack, fully powered, back up powered, air conditioned, and in a secure building staffed by people who usually know what they’re doing.

Then, simply point your Mac’s Time Machine to the static IP address for your very own Time Capsule, and what stores in Vegas, stays in Vegas. You’re backed up over the internet. Set up is straightforward, but comes with the requirement of a few clicks in Time Capsule.

Obviously, you won’t be using the Wireless capability of Time Capsule. After all, Las Vegas is far away from wherever you are unless you’re in Las Vegas. That’s how God wants it to be.

You can control your Las Vegas based Time Capsule by using a web interface to recycle power, or simply by using the Apple Airport Utility in Mac OS X.

It may take awhile for that first online back up to finish, depending on the speed of your internet connection. After that, it’s all Time Machine and those hourly, incremental back ups. From your place to Las Vegas.

It even works in reverse, so you can use your Las Vegas-based Time Capsule to restore your back in the event that something on your home Mac died.

This kind of remote back up system has benefits. It’s yet another way to store your data somewhere else besides on your Mac or at home. Yet, it works perfectly with your Mac because that’s what Time Machine and Time Capsule do.

And it brings up another question for another article. Is it time for online back ups to go mainstream? There’s Amazon’s inexpensive AWS service, BackJack, and Mozy? Are these back up systems ready for mainstream, prime time for the rest of us?

Share your experience and concerns in the Comments section below.

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.

Off Topic #23 & #18 - Want to speed up your Mac? Try Kate MacKenzie’s approach to the $7.99 speed increase. Do you have a back up system for your Mac? Kate’s PixoBebo shows you how to use Time Machine with SuperDuper! for the ultimate Mac back up. And she doesn’t even charge Mac360 readers to visit her site.

Off Topic #6 - The MacHeist is back. In case you missed it a few months ago, MacHeist is a great way for Mac users to get 12 top Mac applications and utilities for $49. Many of these have been reviewed on Mac360, so we highly recommend that you take a look. The value, what you get for what you pay, is remarkable. Click Here to look, buy, download.

• Article by Jeffrey Mincey • Published on Friday, May 2, 2008
• Category: Reviews • 4 Reader comment(s) • Email This • Digg This • Shop Now

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Readers Talk Back:

Eric says:

The remote backup is nice, but I just use iPodBackup to back up my data to my iPod.
Since the iPod is always with me, I protect it about as well as my own body (which may not be saying much).

— Posted on Fri May 02 at 12:00 pm by Eric

Jim Kauffman says:

I use Crashplan and have never looked back. A one-time charge of 20 bucks for their software lets you automatically back up, with encryption, to an unlimited number of friends/family computers on your LAN (wired and wireless) or remotely over the internet.

For a $60 one-time software purchase, you get a few more bells and whistles, like priority support and unlimited versioning—being able to go back to a particular version of a document.

I backup to another Mac in my household, a friend’s PC in Canada and Crashplan’s own servers. Crashplan’s servers cost $5/month.

Peace of mind without the limitations and quirks of Time Capsule.

I don’t have a business interest in Crashplan. I’m just a satisfied customer who has finally found an easy, flexible, automated way to back my stuff up.

I figured if it weren’t easy and automatic, it would never get done. Crashplan gets it done.

— Posted on Fri May 02 at 10:31 am by Jim Kauffman

stwf says:

sorry, but I have to disagree about Mozy. I tried it and gave up due to the excessively slow upload times. I don’t know how much data you had, but I tried to back up 40GB of photos and music.
The backup would have taken over a year to complete!

This colocation thing is an interesting idea, are the computers backed up? As good as an offsite data center is, all hard drives fail. Will the colocation service keep a backup handy? If not you may need another backup service for when the Time Capsule fails.

I think I’ve settled on Time Machine (located locally), that is copied weekly to AWS (in the event of true disaster). The cost of using AWS is low and the backups are measured in hours!

— Posted on Fri May 02 at 10:04 am by stwf

Randy says:

I have been using Mozy for Mac for a few years now. I love it. Set it and forget it. For roughly five dollars a month for unlimited space, it’s a great deal. You can recover files pretty quickly. See the Mozy web site for more information.

Initial backups can take days, but after the initial backup is done, it’s simply a matter of doing incremental backups. This all occurs in the background so you are never aware of a backup occurring meaning that your workflow is never disrupted.

So far, this has been my remote backup of choice. Aside from Mozy, I use Superduper to perform nightly clones of my main drive just in case. Superduper is fantastic and works extremely well.

— Posted on Fri May 02 at 4:45 am by Randy

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