FreeNAS and Mac OS X - brilliant!

Ok... I admit that this article doesn't bear any relation to cars or games, but I thought some of you might find it interesting anyway. I was recently looking for a solution to (1) automatically backup my main computer (an Apple iMac running OS X), and (2) make use of an old PC I had lying around. I am paranoid about making backups, especially with regard to my 5000-odd digital photos. I regularly back-up to a portable USB hard drive that I keep off-site, but I was also looking for a solution that would enable me to schedule back-ups to run overnight, without any intervention required on my part.

Having a spare PC lying around I figured I'd install Linux, chuck in a few hard drives, and run a simple script from the Mac to back-up my files. I initially chose DSL, a cutdown Linux that would not overly tax my old PC hardware. After messing around with DSL for a weekend - while following the helpful tips of a colleague - I still managed to completely fail to get Samba server running correctly. I then remembered that another colleague had suggested I give FreeNAS a try. Installing FreeNAS was as simple as installing DSL, but the big difference was configuring the software for file sharing. FreeNAS was amazingly simple, with all configuration performed through an intuitive web GUI. And a nice surprise was inbuilt support for AFP, which it seems is the most straight-forward way to share files with a Mac running OS X. Apple Filing Protocol seamlessly supports long-filenames, which is pretty essential in my book. And enabling it in FreeNAS was simply a matter of ticking a box! Connecting to the FreeNAS box from my Mac was easy as well, and you can find some great tips on ways to automatically connect on startup etc. at MacOsXHints.com

From the Mac side of things, I wrote a simple script that used the ditto command to copy directories from the Mac to the FreeNAS PC. There is probably a more technical way to schedule the script to run automatically, but I found that iCal did the job nicely. In iCal I created a calendar recurring event/appointment for the back-up, and enabled the alarm feature. Instead of the alarm playing a sound or emailing me a reminder, I selected the option to run a script or command. So now, every time the back-up appointment alarm occurs, it triggers the backup script to run. Oh, and make sure to create a new calendar group for the back-up appointments so you can choose to hide the appointments from view- otherwise your calendar will look rather busy!

Overall, I reckon FreeNAS is a brilliant piece of (free) software. It is very stable, easy to configure, and it has been working extremely well as part of my back-up solution. I definitely recommend it to Mac users who have an old spare PC lying around. But back to cars and games in my next article, I promise :)