I've got a Macbook backed-up using Timemachine to an external HDD, and i've just bought an iMac, which i want to back-up also using Timemachine to the same external HDD. Is this possible?
When i try turning on Timemachine on the iMac, it recognises the Macbook back-up, but doesn't seem to give the option of backing-up the iMac.

Any ideas?

Also is it possible to have two PC/Macs connecting to the same ext HDD at the same time? (1 using Firefire800 & the other USB2.0).

Cheers, Daz

 

Sorted it. You just right click on the Timemachine icon and do 'Back Up Now', and it creates a new back-up folder with the computer's name in the main back-up folder, along side the Macbook folder.

So that just leaves the question about having 2 computers connected to one ext HDD at the same time.

Regards, Daz

 

Hi Daz,
I would strongly recommend you do NOT have two computers connected to the same external drive at the same time. I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure you would get read/write access issues as both machines could be trying to read/write to/from the drive at the same time.

What might be a better thing to do is to have the external drive attached to one mac, enable file sharing on that mac, and from the other mac, connect to the first mac. Time Machine does support backups to AFP mounted drives, so when you connect from the second mac to the first mac you should be able to see and mount the time machine drive, and then you can configure time machine on the second machine to backup to the networked drive.

The only other solutions would be for each machine to have it's own external drive to backup to, or you could have a third mac, acting as a server, you'd basically do the same as mentioned above, except you'd have both macs connecting to the third "server" mac and backing up the data to there.

 

Hi Markus, thanks for your reply.
Yeh, i thought they'd be problems if they both tried to read/write at the same time. I didn't know whether the HDD is intelligent enough internally to act like ethernet or token ring regarding access.

I'll try wirelessly accessing the HDD through the iMac, or it isn't that much of a problem to connect to the HDD separately. I only intend connecting the Macbook at most once a day.

Cheers, Daz

 

You can just access it through file sharing... Easy.