(Apologies if reviving an old topic) I have managed to get Time Machine backing up (OS X Sierra) to my WD My Cloud over the Internet. I created the relevant port forwarding for AFP and told Time Machine to backup to the following (XXXXXXX being my identifier):
afp://wdmycloud.deviceXXXXXXX.wd2go.com
My question is, is the data transfer secure ? I have done some research that states that AFP is not secure, However, I have also read that connections to My Cloud via wd2go.com ARE secure, so somewhat naively perhaps, I am wondering if the combination is a secure one? Or am I just effectively making the equivalent of a direct connection to the IP address of my router?
AFP is just like any other non-encrypted file protocol i.e. CIFS, SMB, FTP, HTTP etc. so no it’s not secure. The connections to wd2go is only secure over HTTPS (relay mode) but not secure if you’re merely using wd2go DNS to route back directly to your MyCloud. DNS and file protocols are two different things.
Conclusion, if you’re going to implement AFP over the internet and do not have VPN, the least you could do is to tunnel it over secure protocol, hint SSH. Though this will drastically slow down the transfer due to encryption on the under powered MyCloud.
I did not realise that encrypting the backup also encrypted the data transmission to disk (i.e encryption of the backup is local on the Mac prior to sending to the backup disk), but I guess it must do so thanks!
