Odd Time Machine question

I have a 1TB Lacie Rugged hard drive that I use for Time Machine backups of my 15" MBP. I have the drive partitioned into 3 groups. One is an NTFS structure, because I occasionally use a PC, one is a "transfer" section that's FAT32 formatted (and obviously only 32GB), and the final is HFS+ formatted, and that is almost exclusively used for Time Machine.

Last week, I picked up what I thought would be a useful device. It's a BuffaloTech Cloudstor Pro (a 2TB remote storage device, a personal "cloud"). I tossed a second WD Green 2TB drive into it, and set it up RAID1. The Cloudstor is little more than a hard drive enclosure with a pogoplug device, all in one. It uses the Pogoplug software and interface.

I got this thing for two reasons. The first is to be able to do wireless backups of both my MBP and my wifes iMac (which doesn't have Time Machine, but will be upgraded to Lion soon). The second is to be able to use my iPad (along with the camera kit) to remotely backup photos taken on vacation.

A Time Capsule would have handled the first task, but not the second. The camera backup thing is a limitation of the iOS software from Pogoplug, unfortunately.

Since I travel a lot, I wanted to be able to do Time Machine backups to that drive from anywhere with a WiFi connection.

Talking with Buffalo, it seems like this is impossible. It is also impossible to actually get the Cloudstor to do a Time Machine backup locally. I'm working on that problem right now, but my question is this:

Does anyone know of a way to use Time Machine to back up to a remotely located drive?

I.e. I have my cloud drive hooked up to my LAN through my wireless router. I can access that drive via the online interface or using the Pogo desktop program from anywhere in the world (and the computer treats it like a standard drive).

How can I do Time Machine backups to that drive when I am off of my LAN?

 

I have spent the bulk of today attempting to configure this thing for Time Machine use (locally), to no avail.

So far, I can't see any reason why this is a better solution that a simple 2TB Time Capsule, other than the RAID1 array and the fact that I can access it from the internet. No remote backups off-LAN means it's not much more than a very large iDisk.

So far, Buffalo's tech support has almost zero knowledge of the way Apple's work. For example, when attempting to use the drive as a Time Machine, you are asked to log in. But the login information does not exist, and you are forced to connect as a guest. The best information I am given, was a 3 word reply saying "try using guest".

I'll keep trying, and keep posting up any new info I find. If anyone has any insight, I'd appreciate the advice.

 

Update:

Buffalo is of very little help, but someone pointed out that you need to use your Ethernet MAC address, rather than your WLAN MAC address. That seems to have done the trick.

So that I wouldn't take up all 2TB for my personal backups, I created my own sparsebundle disc and copied it onto the Buffalo "time machine" server (so I didn't use their web UI to create a time machine profile). I allocated 600GB to my MBP and I'll do the same for my wifes computer. That'll leave us with ~700GB left over.

LAN takes a while, though. I'm currently doing a backup. It's been going for about 1.5 hours, and just transferred 25 of 339 gigs. Activity Monitor says it's crawling along at about 8MB/s, which seems AWFULLY slow for a gigabit connection.

I haven't decided how to set up the iTunes library yet, but I think I want all of my songs on the NAS, and then set her library up to run off of it (since she has a desktop, this won't be problematic). New purchases I make won't be reflected on the NAS, but I haven't bought a new iTunes song in a while (I already have a near-10,000 song library).

What I'm not sure about, is iPhoto. I want to see if I can set up active-copy on iPhoto so that local changes are reflected on the backup drive. That'll allow us to view any photos she has from anywhere on our iPad, my MBP, my iPhone, or whatever.

Not sure the best way to go about that yet.

 

If you have a NAS device (network accessible storage), then TM can do backups over your wireless LAN. The initial backup will take a LONG time, but after that, it's not too bad (because TM just reports the changes from period to period).

Right now, I am attempting to set up my router so that I can use TM remotely while I'm away but on a WiFi network. I travel a lot, so that's something that would be very useful to me.