remote access to external hard disks

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Level 1

13 points

remote access to external hard disks

Before the pandemic, my colleagues at work often had to copy several large files (about 100 GB per colleague) to an external hard drive as a backup. It was either done over our local network or by physically giving my colleagues the hard drive so that they could copy their files on it.

Since the pandemic, we all have to work remotely from our respective homes, but my colleagues still have to periodically send me large files to copy them on the external hard drive. WeTransfer is not a viable option since the files that have to be sent are more than our company’s WeTransfer Pro’s size limit (20 GB).

What can I do to easily give my colleagues some kind of remote access to the external hard drive connected to my Mac without having to buy some software or to install or configure something on my colleagues’ Mac?

Ideally, I would like something akin to what we used to do at work using our local network and that even the less tech-savvy of my colleagues could do without hassle.

My iMac is using macOS Catalina and my colleagues’ Mac use Catalina down to macOS High Sierra.

Thanks!

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on May 26, 2020 7:24 PM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

124,330 points

May 27, 2020 1:06 PM in response to RémyGrondin

You would have to "poke a hole" in your Router to let them in. You can sort of make it safe, but not really. You would forward traffic coming into the router on the external IP address to your Mac. However, ISPs will change your external IP address occasionally, some more often than others.

Then, they could connect to your Mac via file sharing.

You could just use MailDrop in Mail. It would make more work for you as you would have to get them from iCloud and save them to the external.

You can also use Screen Sharing, but you would have to logged into your Mac, and you would see them manipulating your Mac.

Sharing a folder on iCloud Drive is also possible

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Answer 2

RémyGrondin Author

Level 1

13 points

May 27, 2020 4:56 PM in response to Barney-15E

MailDrop or iCloud Drive shared folders are not really a solution for us. As I said, the files that my colleagues need to send me are usually between 60 GB to 120 GB per colleague…

Your first suggestion, “poking an hole” in my router sounds good, and security is not this much of an issue for those files. The problem is that I just don’t know how to setup such a thing! 😏

Does someone who know how to do it explain it to me? That would be great! 😄

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Answer 3

Barney-15E

Level 10

124,330 points

May 27, 2020 6:16 PM in response to RémyGrondin

It's not about the security of the files. It's about the security of your Mac. When you port forward, you are revealing your Mac to the internet. Your router acts as a firewall separating your computers from the Internet. When you port forward, you will have thousands of bots trying to penetrate the security of macOS. You can obfuscate that by telling your Mac to use a different port for file sharing, which makes it tougher for attackers to figure out how to get in. But, you still have a vulnerable access point that they will quickly discover.

You can enable and configure ipfw to only allow connections from your coworkers' IP addresses which will provide additional protection.

To be more secure, you could use ssh remote login, but that is much more complicated.

It would be best to seek professional help. It is extremely difficult to establish this kind of thing and remain secure.

It's not like you can turn on port forwarding and nobody will notice. The entire world will notice and start paying a lot of attention to you.

Search for Port Forwarding in general and how to set it up on your specific router. You can use WhatsMyIP to determine the IP address to tell your coworkers to connect to. When they tell you it doesn't work anymore, check again because your ISP probably changed it. You would pick some random, unused port to forward to SMB (139) and tell your coworkers to connect with smb://ip-addres:<same random port number>

Using iCloud Folder Sharing would not be really much different than connecting to your Mac. It doesn't matter how you connect to the other end of the internet, it will be just as slow as any other method. File sharing over the internet is not anything like file sharing over your internal LAN.

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remote access to external hard disks

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