Is there a way to sync iTunes over wan?

Whatever it is that you need urgently, you can get electronically. Apps/music/movies from itunes, photos and contacts by icloud, documents and everything else by email/dropbox/icloud storage.

Photos aren't on iCloud already? If they're not then you need to have somebody go on your mac and upload them somewhere.

If you have file sharing turned on on your home mac, and another mac near you, you can mount the drive containing both your iTunes library and iPhoto library, and open it on the mac that you are near. You can then plug in your iPad to that mac, and it will sync like you are at home... but it does require that you have file sharing turned on, and your router(s) configured properly. :\

If you have remote access to the mac (back to my mac?) you might be able to email them to your self and save them to the ipad that way.

yalag said:

I have a Mac near me.
I have back to my Mac so I can Remote Desktop.
So I think I'm ready to go.
Can you let me know of the steps to share and mount this folder?

Click to expand...

Before I give you the instructions on how to do this, you may want to consider emailing yourself the photos, or putting them on dropbox, and save them to your iPad camera roll. It will be much faster, and safer (no risk of network errors causing disconnections and errors on your iTunes/iPhoto libraries).



With that said, here we go:



- Remote back into your home mac, then go to System Preferences > Sharing.

- Turn on "File Sharing", and then add the volumes for the drives where both your iTunes and your iPhoto library are, and add users that are allowed to connect (this part may vary based on what version of OSX you have.)

- On the mac near you, in Finder, press Command + K (or goto Go > Connect to server...)

- Connect to: afp://yourHomeIPaddressHere

- Once connected, you will see the shared drive appear on the desktop of the mac you're using.

- In the drive that just mounted, find your "iPhoto Library" and double click on it. This will open iPhoto on your current mac with the library on your desktop. (This may take a while, or appear to freeze if depending on the size of your iPhoto library and the speed of the connection.)

- Open iTunes while holding Option, and click "choose library", then choose the library that is mounted to the desktop.

When you connect your iDevice, it should connect to iTunes and work as if you were on the desktop computer, but it will be accessing the libraries on your home PC.


Remember, if you choose to do the remote access, everything will be bottlenecked to the slowest upload speed of either your home or remote connection, and if you've got a multiple GB iPhoto/iTunes library, this may take forever, or even hang, potentially causing errors in your libraries.

Good luck!