Why Is File Sharing Still So Difficult?

I wanted to do something very simple over the weekend. I wanted to set up my Windows Vista computer to backup automatically to a drive shared on the network by my Mac Mini. In this day and age, digital information has become so important in our everyday lives that one would hope this is now relatively straightforward, right?

First, let me say that I can accomplish this in my sleep on any non-Windows computer. I work, live, and play on unix operating systems. I know how to configure key pairs and schedule a regular cron job to rsync files over a secure ssh connection. These technologies have a significant learning curve, but they work consistently and reliably.

My first hurdle was Leopard's horrible SMB support. Enabling Windows file sharing on Leopard confronts the user with an intimidating dialog box that warns about storing passwords in a less secure manner. The password on my primary account is important, so I decided to create a separate backup user. Unfortunately, Leopard "sharing only" accounts don't appear on the list of accounts available for Windows file sharing. I had to create a full user account, complete with a home directory.

The next hurdle was logging in from Vista. As I discovered after a solid half hour of tinkering, Leopard's SMB support only accepts the account's full name, not the abbreviated short version.

Vista comes with a backup tool that only supports network backups to Windows file shares. Once I had file sharing with the Mac working, I happily pointed the backup tool at that location. Windows complained about not having "full access," and Leopard doesn't have any option for enabling a higher level of privileges beyond "read & write." So there goes that idea. My Vista computer doesn't store anything more valuable than saved games and screenshots. It's not worth the time to hack something together for automatic regular backups.

Microsoft, how about adding support for backing up to SFTP or WebDAV? These are not new file sharing protocols, and they work cross-platform!

And to be fair, Apple's Time Machine is equally frustrating when backing up to non-Apple computers over the network. Time Machine relies on specific features of HFS+, including a hack in Leopard to enable hard links for directories, so network backups must create an HFS+ disk image on the remote computer.