Partitioning and using ONE hard drive to backup two Mac's using Time Machine...
Two Apples + One Hard Drive + Time Machine = One Happy Mac Fanboy.
Got two Macintosh Computers? One external hard drive? The desire to seamlessly backup all of your information using Apple's Time Machine application? Keep READING!....
Apple's "Time Machine" is a highly effective and user-friendly back-up program that allows you to not only easily back up your HD but allows you to go back to EXACT instances and recover files. From Apple.com:
"Time Machine is the breakthrough automatic backup that’s built right into Mac OS X. It keeps an up-to-date copy of everything on your Mac — digital photos, music, movies, TV shows, and documents. Now, if you ever have the need, you can easily go back in time to recover anything."
Objective: Divide(Partition) an external hard drive to be used for TWO seperate Apple computer's utilizing Mac's Time Machine Backup feature.
What you need:
-An External Hard drive big enough to support both(or all) of your existing hard drives. In my case both of my machines have 250 GB Hard drives so I opted to buy a 500 GB Western Digital 'My Book' .
-Mac OS X 10.5.2 or Higher
-Two or more Apples!
Getting Started ....
One thing that I ALWAYS do before I backup my data is to go back through all of my files and make sure that everything is in order, in tact and looks nice and tidy. Although this is not necessary I do recommend it.
Plug in your external hard drive.
Open up your DISK UTILITY. If you dont know where this is you should(spotlight it).
Now click on the Partition Tab (Shown below)
In the left column select the Disk/Hard drive you are going to split. With the HD selected click the drop-down menu that says Volume Scheme. Select how many different partitions you wish to create. For me two was plenty. I suggest only dividing the HD into as many partitions as you actually need. More is not better in this case. Once you've designated a volume scheme, click on the individual partitions which will be displayed in the middle column. Give each partition a name.(not shown below). Select a desired Format for each partition. Select Mac OS Extended (not-journaled). Now click Apply and your HD will be partitoned.
Partition Interface in Disk Utility:
Any and ALL data saved on your hard drive will be deleted when you partition it! Make sure you save this data elsewhere if you wish to keep it.
Now open up Time Machine. Click Change Disk.... Select the corresponding partition that you just created. Click OK and time machine will begin backing up your data. This will take some time depending on how much information you have stored on your HD.
Time Machine working:
Now you can Eject the HD. On your second machine, open up Time Machine and select the OTHER partition that you created and click okay.
Thats it, pretty easy huh? Contact me with any questions or concerns.
-Tre, who feels better now that he backed up his music and pictures!
Got two Macintosh Computers? One external hard drive? The desire to seamlessly backup all of your information using Apple's Time Machine application? Keep READING!....
Apple's "Time Machine" is a highly effective and user-friendly back-up program that allows you to not only easily back up your HD but allows you to go back to EXACT instances and recover files. From Apple.com:
"Time Machine is the breakthrough automatic backup that’s built right into Mac OS X. It keeps an up-to-date copy of everything on your Mac — digital photos, music, movies, TV shows, and documents. Now, if you ever have the need, you can easily go back in time to recover anything."
Objective: Divide(Partition) an external hard drive to be used for TWO seperate Apple computer's utilizing Mac's Time Machine Backup feature.
What you need:
-An External Hard drive big enough to support both(or all) of your existing hard drives. In my case both of my machines have 250 GB Hard drives so I opted to buy a 500 GB Western Digital 'My Book' .
-Mac OS X 10.5.2 or Higher
-Two or more Apples!
Getting Started ....
One thing that I ALWAYS do before I backup my data is to go back through all of my files and make sure that everything is in order, in tact and looks nice and tidy. Although this is not necessary I do recommend it.
Plug in your external hard drive.
Open up your DISK UTILITY. If you dont know where this is you should(spotlight it).
Now click on the Partition Tab (Shown below)
In the left column select the Disk/Hard drive you are going to split. With the HD selected click the drop-down menu that says Volume Scheme. Select how many different partitions you wish to create. For me two was plenty. I suggest only dividing the HD into as many partitions as you actually need. More is not better in this case. Once you've designated a volume scheme, click on the individual partitions which will be displayed in the middle column. Give each partition a name.(not shown below). Select a desired Format for each partition. Select Mac OS Extended (not-journaled). Now click Apply and your HD will be partitoned.
Partition Interface in Disk Utility:
Any and ALL data saved on your hard drive will be deleted when you partition it! Make sure you save this data elsewhere if you wish to keep it.
Now open up Time Machine. Click Change Disk.... Select the corresponding partition that you just created. Click OK and time machine will begin backing up your data. This will take some time depending on how much information you have stored on your HD.
Time Machine working:
Now you can Eject the HD. On your second machine, open up Time Machine and select the OTHER partition that you created and click okay.
Thats it, pretty easy huh? Contact me with any questions or concerns.
-Tre, who feels better now that he backed up his music and pictures!
Labels: Apple, Partition External Hard Drive for Time Machine, Tech Tutorial, Time Machine
posted by Trevor Gill | 7:44 PM
2 Comments:
Great tip! Are you able to mount each partition separately on both machines (simultaneously)? I have two macs and a lacie 500gb with FireWire 400 and 800 but don't have it partioned yet. I want to backup both machines to separate partitions at the same time--one machine via fw400 and the other via fw800. Do you think it will work? Guess we will see :-)
Paul, thats a good question! I haven't tried to mount both partitions on separate machines at the same time but am interested to hear what happens. Let me know how it goes!
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