Mac Mini (Late 2012) as home server

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Mac Mini (Late 2012) as home server

Purchased a Macbook Air M1 to replace my Mac Mini Late 2012, which has been my home desktop computer with a cinema display. I would like the Mac Mini to be my home server with the new Macbook air being used as my "desktop", connected to the cinema display. I'm looking forward to the convenience of being able to disconnect the MB air from the monitor and work anywhere in our home and have access to my home files.

I've been transitioning from storing files and mail in the cloud to local storage with Time Machine backup and a Carbonite backup. We've had some weather incidents here on Hawaii where internet was out due to severed wires, and we have 1 bar of cell service at house. I still have data with in my Google workspace that I want to move to the local drive (Docs 3 GB, Photos 9 GB)

Mac Mini is running 10.13.6, 8GB RAM, and 500 GB SSD with 125 GB available.

My thought is to leave the Mac Mini as is on the network and enable sharing. However, If I move the MB air to another room, with a strong wifi signal, and open a shared document on the Mac Mini to work on it, will I experience any performance issues?

In addition, is there a way to configure the Macbook Air to use the existing Mail and Photos files on my Mac Mini?

Thanks

Mac mini, macOS 10.13

Posted on Oct 13, 2022 10:29 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

WheelieNick

Level 8

39,807 points

Oct 14, 2022 4:07 AM in response to robwinston

See this link and follow the instructions provided

Use Mac mini as a server – Apple Support (UK)

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Answer 2

Oct 14, 2022 6:09 AM in response to robwinston

Personally, I have a 2010 MacMini that I use as a home file server, file backup, and iTunes "master" library.

However, from bad experiences over the years before I even had the Mini, I learned it is always best to work with files locally and then return them or sync them to the remote storage when I was done working on them. Even with a strong WiFi signal, interference in the signal can still happen and can have some quite undesirable results if working with files remotely which generally happen when you can least afford it to happen.

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Answer 3

robwinston Author

Level 1

4 points

Oct 16, 2022 7:57 PM in response to woodmeister50

Thanks for your perspective on this. Since I have not run an ethernet cable into my home office I would be relying on wifi, which does tend to drop on occasion. Thinking this through more I realized that the point of the MB Air was to have a faster computer and portability. Opening files over the network via SMB and wifi is likely to be slower and could corrupt files. As an example, I depend on Quicken financial software and like the security of having my data file locally. Quicken support states that opening the Quicken data over a network could corrupt the data file. (Quicken does have a free option to be able to access your data via a web browser, but the web version lacks some functionality of the desktop software).

Thus, Quicken and data file will reside on new MB Air. Quicken creates backup files that I can periodically copy to the Mac Mini.

Definitely will make sure that MB Air has Time Machine backups too.

Mail app primary mail account has messages dating back to 2008 ( yes, I do occasionally need to look for legacy information in them). If I archive all messages older than a year, the primary mail account mailbox is dramatically reduced in size. I can create an export of the resulting primary mailbox, and import into MB Air mail app.

It is possible to "point" photos app to the Mac Mini from MB Air. I have not set this up yet so not sure if this will result in slow performance. I rarely edit my photos, but do like to create albums.

I've tried using Screen Sharing app to access the Mac Mini remotely. It seems I need to configure sleep settings in Energy Saver control panel. I have an extra small monitor and keyboard that will probably be wired to the Mac Mini for convenience.

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Answer 4

Oct 17, 2022 5:41 AM in response to robwinston

robwinston wrote:

...

It is possible to "point" photos app to the Mac Mini from MB Air. I have not set this up yet so not sure if this will result in slow performance. I rarely edit my photos, but do like to create albums.

...

The issue with that, if you are away from home, you lose access to your photos.

However, you could create a "master library" that resides on the Mini and a smaller library on the MB Air.

Then again, if you enable iCloud in Photos, all photos will be available everywhere and on the MB Air and any other Apple device, depending on how much space you have, you can set Photo's iCloud preferences to "Optimize Mac Storage" which will only keep smaller copies on the MB Air or if really short on space, it will keep them in iCloud. On the Mini, you can set it to keep full size copies on it.

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Mac Mini (Late 2012) as home server

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