Good morning. Uh, welcome back. We’re at Best Buy today. Christmas came early. More like I had a chore to do. I needed to buy a thing for maintenance reasons. It just so happens to be around Christmas. Nonetheless, I’m going to run into Best Buy right now, grab something, and we’ll talk about it later. All right. All right. We are back from Best Buy. Let me show you what I got.
20 24 terb of storage. Not my first 24 tab of storage. This is actually only for backup. Um, let me explain what I plan to do with this. So, yesterday I’m driving into work. I have a whole plan for this video that I want to shoot. And uh Jeremy the OG hits me up and goes, “Hey, how do you get your Mac Mini to uh be your file server remotely? All these things.” He knows that’s what I do for file management. And he said, “Is there a YouTube video that I could go to and look at to set this up myself?” They say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. YouTube video to learn about this thing I’m already doing here. I am a YouTuber. I’ll just make a video for you. He then called me a content cow. You know, whatever. I’m making Jeremy this video as an instructional video for how to set up a Mac Mini as a remote server for file storage. basically replacing what a NAS would do. So, so back to Best Buy. So, I already have 24 terabytes in a RAID 5 system serving me all my media, but I’m paranoid and I need some reinsur reassurance. And so, I bought 24 TB for backup storage. I would say most notable, most intelligent people on this on the internet would tell you you want to have three copies of your files in two locations and one in the cloud. I think that’s the 321, something like that. You know, I’m not made of money. I can’t do that. So, I’m progressively getting there and hopefully nothing goes wrong. Fingers crossed. Um, until I get to a proper 321. Today, I’m achieving part of that. So, I want to set this up as a backup time machine setup onto my pre-existing system. First, let me show you how I have everything configured. I’ll do a little instructional for Jeremy. Shout out the boy. So, pretty pretty simple setup. We have the Mac Mini plugged directly into my network with a Thunderbolt cable coming down here to the OWC Thunderbay, uh, which lets me do RAID 5 and allows me to do five HDD hard drives. Um, it’s really noisy. I bet you can hear it right now. That is my one con my one complaint here. Uh but then everything is managed via Mac OS software and OWC software. All right, let me show you how I have this set up. As you can see, I have Mac Mini as a server option. Um and it it shows me all my Macintosh HD stuff. It shows me the OWC Thunderbay, which I call SAM server, and then a user folder. How do we set this up? How do we get here? All right, here we are. This is Mac OS 26. I set this up on 25. It should be the same deal. No, it wasn’t 25. What What did they call it before? Not Tahoe. Sequoia. I did this on Sequoia. Go into your settings. general sharing. And we want to turn on file sharing. Boom. Okay. I’m going to blur this IP address, but there’s an IP address, an SMB IP address. That is a super important number that we’re going to use. We’re going to add shared folders. This is where you can pick your external hard drive. So in this instance, we’ll choose Mac Mini SAM server. Then what we’re going to do, we’re going to turn off allow full disk access for all users. And we should be able to add users. Now
we’ll we’ll There we go. Okay. Sam Brown read and write everyone else no access. So using my computer password login I will have access to this uh server. That’s the core of it. That is as simple as it gets. You just turn on file sharing in general. You make note of that SMB server uh that SMB SMB IP address and then you go into your finder and you connect to a server and bam, you can just type it in here. Here’s the big fork in the road, Jeremy. This is for you. This only allows you to access files and your server in your network. So, you have to be on Wi-Fi in this place for it to work. And you’re like, well, that’s not as helpful. The goal for me when I was setting this up was to be very similar to iCloud Drive. I love iCloud Drive. I think it’s up there. It’s It’s so nice. the integration, how it does downloads and uploads and stuff. It’s near perfect, but I’m capping I think I’m on the family plan with like six terabytes in total and here I am with 8 tab trying to fill 24. It just I can’t I’ve outgrown it. I need something else. The biggest aspect of that is remotely accessing your files. How do I do that? Pretty easy. I go to a website called Tailcale. Tail Scale is great. It’s a free-touse VPN service meant for businesses and most importantly this act this application of file sharing. Here you’ll see I have four machines all connected to tail scale. Um, and then I set my Mac Mini as an exit node. So, because I use the exit node on the Mac Mini, it emulates my houses network anywhere I’m connected to my tail scale VPN. that then means I have to use tail scales IP address. So when I go to connect to a server I use uh this like 100 blank blank blank not the 192 that is in my house. I don’t want to go too much into tail scale cuz honestly I don’t know a ton about it. I know enough to get my VPN set up for this file sharing and stuff like that. Um, not enough to recommend for other use cases apart from this. But everything I’ve done with Tail Scale has been kind of awesome. It’s free to use. I have four machines, my iPad, my phone, my MacBook, and the Mac Mini all connected. And the Mac Mini is the hub and it sets my my IP address for when I’m remote and have to still access my files and stuff. So, I’m loving it, but I I don’t want to go so far as to recommend it. Any VPN will work in this situation. Just requires a little more like uh
a little more study. Um but yeah look into tail scale Jeremy use tail scale. There is a third aspect to all of this that is the jiniqua. Uh the Mac Mini is very good at staying on for long periods of time but you know you have power outage things happen. That’s why it’s connected to the TV and I can access it remotely or go into the actual computer and use it like a regular computer. But to remotely access I use Parseek. Parseek also a freeto use um program. Again, sorry I’m blurring everything. I just don’t want there’s work stuff. I don’t want bad actor, you know, to see any of this. But I can connect to my Mac Mini, which is running soft RAID, which puts me in RAID 5. And you can see I have 24 terabytes. They’re all kicking. That’s it’s as easy as that. I mean, you know, your specific use case, you know, you’ll find there there are things that you got to adjust and whatnot, but overall,
it’s as easy as that. This is a DIY solution compared to Synology, UG Green, um, who else is making Naz’s dedicated Naz.
I’ve heard kind of bad things about them. I know my system is not like the most ideal setup, but it works pretty amazingly for what I got going on. So, yeah. Uh Jeremy, let me know. If you have questions, hit me up. If you are watching this and are thinking, “This is cool. I have a Mac lying around and I want to, you know, host my own data without using Google Drive or iCloud or buying Sonology and do this. Let me know how it goes. Uh it’s been really fun project to work on and it’s not over. So that brings me to today and what I’m doing with this expansion port. I don’t have 24 terabytes lying around to serve as a backup. So, I bought this thing. It was on sale at Best Buy. I want to set it up with Time Machine to be a
automated backup system that I never have to think about. It doesn’t need to be RAID. It just needs to be another chain of foolproof. So, let’s try and set that up now. All right, we just got this guy set up. Um, super simple. It just connects via USB 3.0. I wasn’t expecting that, but you know, it’s it’s HDD, so there’s not like a ton of throughput here. Um, let’s go back to the computer and see. Let’s get this guy set up. All right, we are back into the Mac Mini. Let’s see.
See what we got.
Okay, just like that. Expansion, it’s there. Let’s get this guy initialized. Let’s go to disk utility. All right, you can see these are all my RAID drives. Seagate expansion, though. That’s what we are going to mess around with. We’re going to erase that. All right. So, I’m just erasing uh the new expansion drive before we set it up in Time Machine. All right. So, it just erased and you can see now we have Sam’s server back. What happened there? SAM server backup.
Perfect. Perfect. And just to check we didn’t erase the wrong thing. Sam server is here. It’s got everything I need. All right. We’re going to add a time machine backup now. SAM server backup. Setup disk.
Encrypt backup.
Uh, no password. That’s okay. Disk usage limit none. Done.
All right. Uh, was easy as that? I I’m not sure. Uh Sam server Sam server backup is there. Open time machine settings.
Oh, you know what? Let’s exclude. I see this is what I want to exclude. I want to exclude Macintosh HD.
Bang. There we go. Excluding Macintosh HD, we have 6 78. It’s climbing, but look, only.1% done. It’s got to back up 8 GB of storage right now. Um, but once that’s that initial aspect is done, it’s going to do it every time there’s a change. So, it’s not I don’t have to manually back this up every time I do something. It’s going to have everything copied over and once something changes within the volume, it’s going to just write that little section. So, should be super simple. Should be super easy. Only have to knock out this first 17 hours and everything else is a breeze. But yeah, that’s it. That is my file management setup. I use tail scale. I use a Mac Mini and create my own NAS um using a DAZ which is direct attached storage with the OWC Thunderbolt 4. This is all just summary. Hopefully you caught it. Hopefully this is helpful and you get to do something similar, you know, repurpose an old Mac that’s lying