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Access my files anywhere?

E

Eric8199

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 27, 2009
804
236
I have two Macs, a MacBook Pro 15" and an MacBook Air 11". I rarely use the MBP anymore, except that it has a 1tb hard drive where I store all my files, music, movies, photos, etc. I would like to be able to access these files anywhere. How do I set this up?

I've used Back to My Mac and sharing, but as far as I know, BTMM will go away when MobileMe is discontinued, and when I share folders, it doesn't allow me to access files from within those folders, I have to share each file separately.

There has to be an easy way to do this, so that if I am away from home and want to access, say, a photo or a document on my computer at home, I can do it easily. And I'm looking for a free or one-time payment solution, rather than a subscription to something like Dropbox (I use Dropbox's free version, and love it, but it would be too expensive to buy enough space to do what I want to do). I don't know if the solution is Lion Server, or if there is something else. I'm not really familiar with servers, and don't want to install something I might regret later on.

Any help?
 
you can use dropbox, teamviewer, logmein. all good options. icloud should also allow that when its available.
 
I already said in my post that dropbox isn't going to do it for me. I'm looking for something that will give me access to 500GB worth of stuff. Basically, I want to be able to access anything on my MBP, without ever having to touch my MBP.
 
Eric8199 said:
I already said in my post that dropbox isn't going to do it for me. I'm looking for something that will give me access to 500GB worth of stuff. Basically, I want to be able to access anything on my MBP, without ever having to touch my MBP.
Click to expand...

What's wrong with Back to my Mac?
 
It doesn't work properly. See above post. I have to manually share each individual file, sharing folders doesn't work. Also, it rarely let's me connect unless I'm on the same network. It's not reliable enough.
 
I use a dynamic dns service to ensure that I can always get to my home networks IP - once you can do that, there's no shortage of ways to access the machines on the network.
 
Enable File Sharing from System Preferences -> Sharing, then forward TCP port 548 to your computer, then from the Finder, Go -> Connect to Server... -> afp://youripaddress

You can create an *.afploc file with this XML in it that, when double clicked, opens the Finder and connects automatically. I have a file like this on my USB drive for when I go to school. I also have one for screensharing and SSH login.

Code: 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>URL</key>
    <string>afp://XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Just replace the X's with your IP address and save it as *.afploc

If you have a dynamic IP address, you can use a service like dyndns and put your domain instead of your IP address.
 
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