Make Time Machine remotely back up to your Time Capsule

by Matt on November 30, 2008

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KB wrote in to ask whether it is possible to have her Mac Book’s Time Machine automatically mount her Time Capsule (which is at her home) while she’s traveling and back up her Mac. The answer is yes, but it’s only easy to do if you have MobileMe.

For those of you without a MobileMe account, this solution won’t work (which is another reason to consider getting this great service). For those of you with a MobileMe account, let’s proceed. I am going to assume that you have only a single-user MobileMe account. If you have a family account, then without any more help, this hint will work if you are also the administrator of the Time Capsule. In addition, I am assuming you have already set up your Mac to back up to your Time Capsule. This solution is for adding a remote backup function, not setting up your Mac to use Time Capsule.

Basics

You need a few things to start: Your MobileMe user name and password, an internet connection, and administrator access to your Time Capsule. If you’re the only person using all of these, you should be all set.

The first thing we need to do is make sure you have set up your MobileMe account on your Mac. If you already have done this and turned on Back To My Mac, skip down to “Getting the Password” For the rest of us, you can find the MobileMe preferences in your System Preferences (access those from the Dock, your Applications folder, or the Apple Menu). Note: If you’re still running a plain-vanilla version of 10.5 Leopard and have never used Software Update, your Mac may still list the MobileMe preference as .Mac. I highly recommend you run all of your software updates before proceeding.

Here’s what we’re looking for:

Once you click on the MobileMe preference, your account page will come up. If you have not entered your MobileMe user name and password, it will provide fields for you to do so. Once you enter this information and it is verified you should get a screen similar to this:

The key here is that the screen says you are signed into MobileMe. Once that’s the case, click on “Back to My Mac.” Once on this screen, you need to click on the “Start” button to turn on the service. Note: If you don’t want to use the Back to My Mac service, that’s ok. We only need the computer to connect to the MobileMe servers once to generate a password. Once Back To My Mac is running, you can feel free to shut it off.

Great! Now you can quit your System Preferences.

Getting the Password

Now that we’ve set up our MobileMe account and Back To My Mac, we need to get our Back To My Mac password. To do so, go to your Applications Folder. From there, open your Utilities folder. Finally, in the Utilities folder, open the program called “Keychain Access.”

In the upper left pane, click on the “System” keychain. Then, look for the key that is the kind called “Back to My Mac key.” You’ll probably only have one of these, and it take the form of username.members.mac.com or username.members.me.com, where username = your MobileMe user name. It looks like this:

Now, double click on that key, and a new window will open. At the bottom, click on the checkbox next to “Show password.” A new administrator verification window will pop up, and you need to enter your computer’s admin password in order to view your Back to Your Mac password. Once done, you should see something like this:

Finally, highlight the password and copy it into your clipboard. We will need this password in just a minute. (Alternately, you can copy and paste it into a sticky if you think you’re going to need to use the clipboard before we finish this set up.) Take note of whether your account says username.members.mac.com or username.members.me.com. It does matter, so write it down. If you’ve only added your account since .Mac switched to MobileMe, it’ll say me.com. If you’re an old .Mac user, it’ll probably say .mac.com. Now you can quit Keychain Access. (If the program asks you if you want to save changes, say no.)

Time Capsule Setup

The last big job we have is to make some changes to the Time Capsule setup. You’ll need to open your AirPort Utility, which is in the same folder as Keychain Access. Once you open the AirPort Utility, you should see your Time Capsule listed in the window, like this:

Obviously, my Time Capsule is called Satellite. Double click on your Time Capsule. You may then have to enter your Time Capsule’s password in order to configure your settings. Once that window opens, you’ll be on the Summary tab. Click on the “Time Capsule” tab, then click the Edit button, as shown here:

Once you click the Edit button, you should get a window like this:

Ok! This is where the meat of the project comes in:

You will not have the “Use dynamic global hostname” checkbox checked, but we want to do so now.
Make sure you have something filled in for “Local Hostname.” Anything is fine.
Now, back on the “Hostname” line, we’re going to fill it in with a long string. The first word will be your local hostname. Since mine is Satellite, my first word is satellite. Then I put a period, followed by my MobileMe user name (in my photo, I just put the word “username.” You’ll replace it.). After that, you’ll put another period, followed by members.mac.com or members.me.com, depending on what your keychain indicated your account used.
On the “User” line, this is again going to be your MobileMe user name, followed by a period, followed by members.mac.com or members.me.com (whichever is correct for your account).
On the “Password” line, you DO NOT put your MobileMe password. Instead, you paste the password we copied from the System Keychain.
Now, click Done, then click the Update button to have your Time Capsule save the settings and restart.

Are we done yet?

Maybe. Theoretically, we’re done! You should be able to leave your home, go to a coffee shop or anywhere else with a wireless network, and within a few minutes of getting online, your Mac should detect your Time Capsule. I have found that, in some cases, it doesn’t quite work perfectly until we try a couple of steps at least one time.

If you go to another wireless network and then check your Time Machine system preference, look to see whether your Time Capsule is recognized. If it is, then you should actually have a date and time listed next to the “Next Backup” line. If you do not, try this:

Simply turn off Time Machine and turn it back on. Wait a minute, and see if this does not correct the problem.
If it still does not, go to the finder, then click on the “Go” menu, followed by “Connect to Server.” For the address, type in that entire host name string. On my computer it was satellite.username.members.mac.com (where username was my username). Then click Connect. If you did not set up your Time Capsule with a password to connect, it should connect on its own. If you set up a simple password only for the device (rather than usernames and passwords), then when the username/password box pops up, your username will be “user” and your password will be whatever you set up on your Time Capsule. Finally, if you chose to use specific usernames and passwords for Time Capsule, enter your username and password. Once your Time Capsule appears under your Devices tab on your Finder window (or Desktop), you can eject the Time Capsule. NOW, go back to your Time Machine preference, turn Time Machine off and then back on and wait a minute to see if the problem has gone away.

These two steps above should only be needed in rare circumstances. For most people, everything should work without the extra steps. A few more notes:

If you’re like me and are stuck with a crummy cable connection at home or remotely, your upload speed is probably not very good, and this will significantly impact how long your Time Machine backups take. In my experience, the “Preparing” step in the Time Machine takes 20-30 minutes remotely before you even get an indicator of how much data needs to be backed up. This isn’t a bug; this is simply what happens when you’re not on a local connection.
Since backups take much longer, you might want to consider downloading a program that lets you schedule your backups rather than using the standard every-hour-when-my-machine-is-plugged-in setting. I recommend the wonderful and free Time Machine Editor.

Update: If, after trying all the steps below, your Time Capsule still does not appear in the Time Machine list of disks, open Terminal and type this command, press return, then reopen System Preferences to look for the disk:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes -bool yes

Did this work for you? Have a suggestion to improve this answer? Post your thoughts in the comments section!

Tagged as: apple, Backup, mac, Time Capsule, Time Machine

{ 4 trackbacks }

Greg Knackstedt: January 5, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Peter George Avalos: March 21, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Yohannes Wijaya: June 4, 2009 at 1:15 am
TwitLinksRSS: June 4, 2009 at 2:05 am

{ 51 comments… read them below or add one }

← Previous Comments

1 Matt January 1, 2009 at 10:57 pm: Another Matt,

It does not matter that you’re using a family account for MobileMe. You do, however, need to make sure that the username you specified in the AirPort Utility global hostname is the same one you are using when connecting under the “Go” menu. I will say, however, that if the username specified for the global hostname *is* the same as your MobileMe username, then it should appear in the “Shared” section of the Sidebar in Finder.

I don’t know anything about your set up, but my first thought is that if you can use the hostname to connect from inside your network but not outside of it, then the Time Capsule is not your only router in your network. Is that the case?
2 Matt January 1, 2009 at 11:05 pm: Simon,

I don’t have a great answer at this point. You should not have to do port forwarding, since you were able to screen sharing from your brother’s computer. That being said, if you have File Sharing turned on with your own Mac, then you might try turning it off (although I don’t think this really should matter in your case). If you want to be certain, you can forward ports 139 and 548 on your Sky router to your AirPort Extreme’s IP address and try again.

Have you tried connecting under the Go menu in the Finder? If this doesn’t work, I’d be curious to know if you could turn on File Sharing with your home computer, forward 139 and 548 to that machine, and then try connecting to your home machine from your brother’s computer. You’d need to know your public IP to connect to your home computer (get this at http://checkip.dyndns.org).

Let me know what happens.
3 Larry January 3, 2009 at 10:04 am: Hi Matt,

When connecting using the following:

afp://:5480 I get the following messages:

The server may not exists or is not operational and then I get an error code -36 and says “the finder cannot complete the operation because some data in afp://:5480 could not be read or written.”

In the time capsule set-up for this mapping I did not use the UDP ports and made the Public TCP port 5480 and the private TCP port 548.

I did call Apple Technical support and they indicated AFP is not designed to be a routable protocol (different private and public ports).

Thoughts? Is there another way of accomplishing this task?

Thank you.
4 Matt January 3, 2009 at 11:32 am: Larry,

It’s hard to offer additional advice without being in front of your machines to take a look at your network setup. The only other advice I can give is to try turning off your other file server temporarily so that you can use port 548 with your Time Capsule. That way, you can at least see if the way your network is configured will allow the Time Capsule to work at all outside of the network (without the other file server’s encumbrance). If it works, you’ve nailed the issue down to the fact you have two file servers. If it doesn’t work, then there’s some other issue (probably a port routing issue/firewall issue).
5 Simon January 4, 2009 at 9:37 am: Hi Matt,

Thanks for the response, I did try the ‘Go’ method without any success.
I have discovered that I can achieve my goal using idrive synced instead.
I think your tutorial would work using a airport extreme + usb drive with a little more tinkering however, I think it would be too volatile for my needs. I’m going to look at setting up a fixed ip and a Wan instead (probs finder a cheaper NAS solution to boot!)

Thanks again for the support
6 Larry January 4, 2009 at 6:44 pm: Matt,

As it turns out, the Linksys NAS 200 only supports the FTP protocol. I found a wonderful third party application called Fetch which has a fantastic GUI interface and makes read/write access to my ethernet storage drive very easy. Between your wonderful solution (and technical support) and Fetch I have my remote needs covered.

Thank you.
7 Another Matt January 7, 2009 at 2:46 pm: Matt,

My Time Capsule is my only router; it’s plugged directly into the cable modem. Do you have any other thoughts on why there’s this discrepancy between how this works when I’m on my local network and how it works when I try to access it remotely?
8 Vilas January 14, 2009 at 10:09 am: Matt,

First of all, thanks for this post. I came across it when trying to set up basically the same thing (except using an Airport Extreme + USB Disk, not a Time Capsule).

I seem to be having the same problem as “Another Matt” — I can “Connect to Server xxxx.xxxx.members.mac.com” when on my home network, and I can ping xxxx.xxxx.members.mac.com from a remote network (and the IP address resolves correctly), so it’s not any type of DNS issue. But I cannot “Connect to Server xxxx.xxxx.members.mac.com” from the remote network – I get the same error code -36.

My home network consists of a DSL modem/router (Westell Versalink 327w) and the AEBS. The Versalink is in full bridge mode, however, so the AEBS should be doing the PPPoE authentication and all the routing functions, so I believe this should all work — but it doesn’t.

One other note: my MobileMe account is “xxxx.xxxxx” — in the system keychain this shows up as “xxxx\.xxxx.members.mac.com”. (Note the extra backslash.) To get the hostname to resolve correctly, I had to preserve the backslash in the AEBS dynamic global hostname and username fields. I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s worth noting.

-Vilas
9 Another Matt January 15, 2009 at 7:31 am: Well, I thought Vilas might have provided the solution for me: As it turns out, xxx.xxx.members.mac.com was not remotely ping-able as I had it set up before. So I changed my DNS from the one provided by my ISP to OpenDNS’s, which fixed that problem (I’ve since discovered that this is a common problem with Time Warner/Roadrunner, so I would recommend everyone with this ISP do the same). But now I really am in the same boat as Vilas: I’m on a remote network right now, I can ping my Time Capsule, but I cannot connect to it with the Finder, and I cannot connect to it with Time Machine.

And ideas?

Thanks Matt and everyone else for helping, by the way…
10 Larry January 26, 2009 at 10:04 pm: Matt,

Using SMB I am able to access the Time Capsule and the attached USB which works terrific on my MAC. Is there a way I can access the Time Capsule Hard drive and/or the USB drive on a windows machine. I have file sharing turned on and the workgroup setting is set to workgroup. I also tried to FTP the Time Capsule drive setting up the default gateway with port 20 in the port forwarding section, but none of these ways worked.

Thank you Matt!
11 Matt January 26, 2009 at 10:26 pm: Larry,

From Windows, you need to create a new Network Place. Check the IP address of your Time Capsule (it’s listed in the Airport Utility). Also, remember the name of your Time Capsule shared folder (on my Time Capsule, it’s called “Data.”)

Then, when creating a new Network Place in Windows, use this for the address:
\\ip.address\share_name
For me, it looks like this:
\\10.0.1.188\Data

That should be all you need to do, unless you’ve required authentication to connect to the Time Capsule. If you need a user/password combo, you’ll have to enter that. If you just set up a password (no user name), then the user name is simply “user” and your password is whatever you set.

Note: Your Time Capsule already has the built-in ability to share with Windows. You do not need to turn it on from your Mac.
12 Larry January 27, 2009 at 6:26 am: Matt,

Sorry, I left out one important piece of information.

I would like to access the Time Capsule remotely from a windows machine and read/write files.

Thanks
13 Matt January 27, 2009 at 11:29 am: Hi Larry,

This is just like trying to port forward with FTP or AFP. You need to forward port 139 (and add 137 and 138 if it still doesn’t work) to the Time Capsule in the Airport Utility, then follow my previous instructions above using your external/WAN IP address rather than the Time Machine’s local address.

Just like before, you’re going to have difficulty with this setup if you want to remotely access two different machines via SMB that are on your home network.
14 Rich February 5, 2009 at 5:18 am: I followed your instructions and I can connect to the Time Capsule remotely (It appears in the Finder under “Shared”). I see the Time Capsule disk as well as the USB hard disk I have attached to the Time Capsule. However, if I try to initiate a Time Machine backup, the backup fails with the error messsage “The backup volume could not be mounted”. This is odd, as I can copy files to the Time Capsule. Any suggestions?
Thanks.
15 Matt February 5, 2009 at 12:57 pm: Rich,

Two things come to mind:
1. I use a disk password for Time Capsule, and sometimes, if I don’t try connecting to the Time Capsule first in the Finder (under Shared), it won’t want to do the backup. This is rare.

2. I’ve found that if you want to do the remote backup, you may have to re-select the Time Capsule disk when you actually are on a remote network. Do this in the System Preferences. I change the disk from from my Time Capsule to no disk, click OK, then go back in and change it to my Time Capsule. The difference, though, is that now the address to the Time Capsule is using the global hostname address, rather than my local Bonjour address. You might try that too.
16 Rich February 5, 2009 at 4:03 pm: Interestingly, when I am now on my home network, and I try to change the Time Capsule backup disk, I see two Time Capsules and two of the usb hard drive I have connected in the list. When I was outside of my network, I only saw one of each. It seems like my Mac thinks there are now 2 Time Capsules. I checked this from another computer on my home network, and I also see 2 Time Capsules. Have you ever seen this before? Thanks.
17 Matt February 5, 2009 at 4:04 pm: Yeah, your system is seeing the local, Bonjour broadcast of the Time Capsule’s availability as well as the global hostname broadcast (which comes from the MobileMe server, not your Time Capsule) of its availability.
18 Rich February 5, 2009 at 4:09 pm: So does it matter which one I select? Or should I just wait till I am outside the network and select that one? One other question. How do I configure my daughter’s laptop to backup from outside the network? She also has a MobileMe account. Since I’ve already entered my password into Time Capsule, and I am the MobileMe administrator, is that going to allow her to connect?
19 Matt February 5, 2009 at 4:18 pm: Rich,
If you can tell which Time Capsule is the global hostname version, select that one. If you can’t, and you then leave your home network, then you’ll just have to reselect it then.

As far as setting up your daughter’s machine goes, this can be done, but it is a pain. You actually have to establish the *same* Back to My Mac key on her machine as you have on yours. It’s not good enough that she’s part of the same family pack. It’s been a while since I have done this, but you could try creating a new keychain item in your daughter’s keychain on her laptop. You’d need to copy all of the settings from your Back to My Mac key, including name/kind/account/where/password. She’ll end up having two Back to My Mac keys: one for her MobileMe user name and one for yours. That’s the only way her machine will be able to see the Time Capsule.

The reason you’re copying *your* key is that you’ve used your key to set up the Time Capsule, so only machines that have your key will be able to get Time Capsule’s location from the MobileMe server.
20 Nick March 26, 2009 at 9:53 am: Matt,

How do I open up ports? My Time Capsule is not my router. I was not sure on where I could find step by step instructions on setting the Time Capsule as the DMZ (as Time Capsule does not support UPnP, so all ports would need to get forwarded there).

Thanks and great article!

-Nick