I love my .mac account, but my idisk has never been the most reliable. It often fails and sometimes I have lost the odd file as it has managed to get out of sync. I have always been able to get it back from backup, but still not a good situation.

I started to think about better ways and then it came to me. SFTP. Since I made the sftp server at work, I realised I could do the same at home.

It all fell into place when macZOT were offering yummyFTP as one of their daily specials. Yummy allows you to mirror a server and a client. The only drawback is, it won't delete files, but that might not be a bad thing

Before I go through how I set this up, I have to point out that you will need to make sure your machines can send and receive sftp on port 22. This may require some firewall changes which are beyond the scope of this article.

Here is what you have to do.

Go to the machine that will act as the server.

Go to your system preferences.

Click on sharing.

Tick the remote login box. This turns on ssh and sftp.

Once that is done, click ok and close all the windows.

You might want to make a folder that you want to sync. I made a folder in my documents folder and copied my idisk files into it.

Now go to the machine you want to sync to the server. Again I made a sync folder in the documents folder.

Download and install yummyftp onto the machine you want to sync with the server.

Open yummy and select sftp.

Log in to the server with your normal os x login credentials.



You will be taken to the home folder of the account you just used. The right hand side is the remote machine and the left hand side is your local machine.



Browse to the folder you want to sync with on the server. I used the sync folder I made earlier.

Now browse to the sync folder you want to sync from.

One folder should have files and one will not.

Now click on the silver sync icon at the top of the window.



Then choose mirror from the pull down menu.



Now click preview.

Depending on how many files you have to sync, this may take sometime, but yummy will show you which files will be synced.



Click sync and off you go.

Once you are happy that it is working, bookmark this server.

Close yummy.

Reopen yummy and open the bookmarked server. Make sure you are within the folders you want to sync. In our case, the folders are called sync.

Now untick preview, click schedule, set the schedule you require.

Click ok and then run schedule.

As long as yummy is open it will sync those two folders at the given time.



If you open the bookmarks windows, you can tell the schedule is set because their is a green dot by the server name.

It works really well and I have had no problems. The traffic is encrypted as you sync so you have security too.

If you want to see what the traffic looks like use this command.

sudo tcpdump -i en0 -A -s 0 port 22 and then upload some files.

The 22 at the end is the port number for sftp. As a side note, if you want to watch other traffic, then try ports, 80 (http), 25 (smtp), 110 (pop), 21 (ftp). Watch your usernames and password go clear text over the internet. en0 is the interfave you want to watch.

Hope this was useful. Not only have you found a nice way to replace idisk, but you are in control and you have no space limitations.