In the past year as I’ve finally dived into the Mac OS ecosystem, one feature which stuck out to me as incredibly useful was “Back to my Mac”, an iCloud based system which allowed any computer running any version of Mac OS X / Mac OS from 10.7 Lion to 10.13 High Sierra to be accessible remotely for both remote desktop (Screen Sharing) and file access as if it was on your local network!
I love simple, built in solutions for what are otherwise slightly complex things to integrate into computer usage. Remote access is usually a bit of a pain and Back to my Mac made it easy enough for me to leave, let’s say, my iMac active at home (it’s usually asleep if I’m not using it) and be able to access whatever I may need to on it while at work.
Even better, it acted as a bridge to a Mac mini I have running all the time as a home file server. That machine only runs up to Snow Leopard, so no “Back to my Mac” for it, but I could still if I was desperate enough for a file, go that roundabout way for it. I actually bought another Mac mini that could run Lion so I could access the feature, but never set that machine up as a “replacement” server, as soon after I would get an Airport Extreme router which, as you can guess, had the feature as well, thus allowing me to access files stored on an external hard drive connected to it as well!
The point is, it was awesome to be able to just connect to machines wherever I was. While it wasn’t always the best (the Airport Extreme, for some reason, needed ports opened on my main gateway, while my iMac and other machines did not) when it worked for me it worked well, and I enjoyed it.
Well, that’s over. On July 1st Apple ended the service on their end, putting an end to this regularly useful little feature. This seems to have been part of Apple’s drive to get out of the networking / server side of things. This wasn’t a surprise thing, either — they had announced back when Mac OS 10.14 Mojave released that Back to my Mac was not available in it, and that people needing such functionality should look for alternatives, and on July 1st of this year they pulled the plug on the whole system.
Ah well, I guess it’s back to trying to figure out an optimum Teamviewer solution for me. That has the benefit of me using Windows systems to access my computers, but I consider it a security risk given how regularly it’s probed for vulnerable systems and accounts. Guess I’ll just have to set up 2 factor authentication and put in an absurdly strong password, won’t I?
Such is (digital) life. I’m glad I got to use Back to my Mac for the time I did. It made things simple and let me get a look at what I could have done had I the money and inclination to have bought a Mac Pro, a Macbook, and some Mac mini’s new over the past decade.
For those curious, here’s a link with a few details. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208922
More to come, as always.