Backing up 2 computers on one external drive

I have a Toshiba Canvio Connect 1TB external drive and I want to back up both a macbook Pro and an iMac desktop to the drive.  How do I put both computers on the same Toshiba drive?

While it is obviously possible, it is not recommended: all hard drives fail at some point and if you back up both of your machines to just one drive, you may lose both backups. So, the best thing would be to back up your backups.

Similar Messages

  • Backing 2 MAcintosh Computers to One Eternal Drive

    I have an IMAC and a MacBook at home and a IMAC at our church - all with Leopard. I want to back them all up to one external hard drive. I rad one of the comments to direct one to another (relatively new to MAC's).
    So is there an easy way to do this - even if I need to partition the external hard drive?

    The same Time Machine drive will back up both macintosh computers. The backups will be stored by computer name in the "Backups.backupd" directory. For example, I have two computers. The first is named "Topher" and the second is named "Zephyr". If I backup both machines to the same Time Machine drive, within the "Backups.backupd" directory will be two folders: the first will be "Topher" and the second will be "Zephyr", and each will be the location of the backups for the respectively named computers.

  • Sharing music on two computers with one external drive

    I'm a Mac. My wife is a PC. If we both link to an external drive and put all of our music on there, can we both access it from our own separate iTunes accounts via file sharing? Will she be able to put music I've downloaded on her iPod? Will I be able to do the same? So far she hasn't downloaded any of her own music onto her computer so if she were to remove her current iTunes from her computer and reload it using my account name, would we both be able to have full access to music both imported and downloaded from both computers? Sorry for the questions on top of questions, but while there are a lot of other posts and articles similar to this one, I haven't found what I'm looking for. Thanks!

    Yes, sorry for piling on. 1st question: Would having her remove iTunes on her PC and reload it under my account name to be able to access my iTunes library on an external drive work?

  • Backing up two computers to one hard drive

    I've been backing up my iMac using Retrospect Express, onto an external hard drive.
    We also have an iBook, which we have not been backing up.
    Two questions:
    1. Can I back up both computers onto the single external drive I already own? If so, do I need to partition the drive (something I know nothing about)?
    2. If I do have to partition, does that mean I lose all the data on my external hard drive?
    2. Since I've got Retrospect Express, not Desktop, on my iMac, I need to buy a new backup program. I could upgrade to Retrospect Desktop (quite expensive; and Retrospect seems to be a fading project); or I could buy Chronosync, SuperDuper, or Carbon Copy Cloner for the iBook. Which of these paths would any of you recommend?
    imac 15 / ibook g3 12 Mac OS X (10.3.9)
    imac 15 / ibook g3 12   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

    You can backup both computers to the same drive, but you would need to partition the drive first. Partitioning will erase all the data on the drive. You will have to backup both computers anew.
    I don't know why you would need to buy a second backup program. Retrospect Express can be used to backup both computers. However, if you wish to replace Retrospect there are some excellent alternatives:
    Basic Backup
    You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
    1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
    2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
    3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
    4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
    5. PsynchX 2.1.1 and RsyncX 2.1 (Freeware)
    6. Carbon Copy Cloner (Freeware - 3.0 is a Universal Binary)
    7. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
    The following utilities can also be used for backup, but cannot create bootable clones:
    1. Backup (requires a .Mac account with Apple both to get the software and to use it.)
    2. Toast
    3. Impression
    4. arRSync
    Apple's Backup is a full backup tool capable of also backing up across multiple media such as CD/DVD. However, it cannot create bootable backups. It is primarily an "archiving" utility as are the other two.
    Impression and Toast are disk image based backups, only. Particularly useful if you need to backup to CD/DVD across multiple media.
    Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.
    Use Disk Utility to partition the drive. Open DU (Utilities folder.) Select your hard drive entry from the left side list (mfgr.'s ID and drive size.) Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window. Select the number of partitions from the drop down menu. Use the resizing gadget to size the partitions. You will need each partition to be large enough to store the contents of the drive it will backup. Set the format type to Mac OS X Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait for the volumes to mount on your Desktop.

  • Backing up two computers to one external disk

    Can you use time machine on two different computer to backup each computer to the same external hard drive.

    I have Time Machine set up with both an iMac and my MacBook using the same drive. But unlike what Canada Steve is doing I've set the MacBook to look at the hard disk as a network volume so backups can be done at the same time and restoring can be done wirelessly.

  • HT201250 Can I use Time Machine on two different Macs to back up to one external drive?

    Can I use Time Machine on two different Macs to back up to one external drive?
    I have one 1T Western Digital backup drive that works well with Time Machine and my MacBook Pro.  I now want to back up my wife's MacBook Air using Time Machine on her Mac and want to know if I can use the same WD external drive or if I need to get a 2nd back up drive?  If I can use one external drive for the two Macs do I need to do something special on the drive or will Time Machine do it automatically?

    Yes. You will need to configure Time Machine preferences on each computer to backup to the same drive. Note that you cannot connect the backup drive to both machines at the same time.

  • Lightroom - how to restore backed up files (not Lightroom catalogue) from one external drive to another?

    How to restore backed up files (not lightroom catalogue) from one external drive to another.
    I recently backuped my photo files from one external drive to another. The backup (carbon copy cloner) pointed to some corrupt files on the original drive.
    I have deleted those files and am finding good copies of them  in Time Machine backups.
    I want to get rid of the original external drive; use the recent backup as my main external and then back it up onto a brand new drive.
    What I am not sure about is how to point lightroom to the backups so it knows to look on the new drive instead of the old drive and all those exclamation marks and question marks go away.
    There are close to 60,000 images in numerous folders all with one 'parent folder.'
    My best guess is from Lightroom Help - Create and Manage Folders -  Locate Missing Folders
    Can I point to the one parent folder and all the subfolders will come back?
    Is this the process to recover files into lightroom and will there be a problem with so many photos?

    http://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm

  • Can i back up 2 macs on one external hard drive?

    can i back up 2 macs on one external hard drive?

    If the external drive is large enough, yes.
    Recent versions of Time Machine will do this across a properly set up and Shared network connection or to a drive on a Server. But you may be unhappy with the amount of Wireless traffic generated to perform the backups, especially the initial full backup.
    Utilities like Carbon Copy Cloner will do this ONLY when performing a file-by-file backup. A "Disk Image" backup reproduces the Source disk, including blank space, and fills the entire Destination drive with the Source Disk image.

  • Two computers using same external drive with TM?

    This will probably display my ignorance, but my daughter just got a macbook with leopard installed, and I'm planning on upgrading to leopard on my iMac.
    So long as it has enough gigs, can I purchase only one external drive and use TM to back up both computers to the same external drive?

    Definitely yes.
    That's what I'm doing. I have a 250GB external drive connected to my iMac, and this drive hosts the TM backup of the imac and of my 2 macbooks.
    The drive is always physically connected with the iMac. Macbooks backup over network. Setup is easy too: first make sure your laptop can see the backup drive as a network share. Then set it as the TM drive. That's it.
    The only issue I found is that somehow my macbooks don't do automatic backups every hour no matter how I configure it. I have to right-click on TM icon and choose "backup now". This is yet to be figured out. Other than that, everything is great.

  • Can I transfer data from one external drive to another using my MacAir as a platform?

    I am trying to transfer about 94 Gigs of data from one external drive (Touro) to another (Seagate) using my Mac Air which only has about 14 Gigs of available space.  How best can I accomplish this operation?

    Niel - I know that I must be a real dunce on this.  I tried opening the additional window on finder and then dragging and dropping from the Touro drive to the other open finder window for the Seagate drive.  Again, it bounced back.  What is NTFS? And how do I find if either or both of the drives are formatted in that manner?
    Again, thanks for you help on this.
    JC
    PS  I just got the info on the Seagate that it is Windows NTFS formatted.  What do I do now?  Is Paragon something I can download off the Internet?  Why, since I formatted the Seagate to run on my Mac Air would there still be a problem?  The packaging on the Seagate says it is compatible with Mac OS systems. jc

  • The memory on my MAC is full. It holds 4GB of RAM of which 79GB are photos. I would like to back up my photos to an external drive but just don not know how. I do not wish to use time machine. How do I back up my photo library, then delete the them t

    The memory on my MAC is full. It holds 4GB of RAM of which 79GB are photos. I would like to back up my photos to an external drive but just do not know how. I do not wish to use time machine. How do I back up my photo library, then delete them from my MAC to free up that 79GB? Thank you.

    Hi
    Just to clarify a couple of points in your post.
    RAM (memory) is different from hard drive space. You have 4GB of RAM, but that has no bearing on the amount of drive space you have, of which we know that 79GB are photos.
    If those photos are in iPhoto, you should be able to move the entire iPhoto Library, from the Pictures folder, to your external hard drive. You can just drag and drop. Do not have iPhoto open while you're doing this. Once it's done, you can double-click on the moved iPhoto Library file to associate it with iPhoto, so that the app remembers where the library is for next time.
    One more thing. When you move a file to a different location, and then delete the original, you don't have a backup. You still only have one copy. So if that external drive dies, you will lose all your photos. Time Machine is a very good way to prevent this from happening. You should dedicate a different drive for Time Machine backups.
    Matt

  • If I back up iMovie projects to an external drive does it take the media with it? I want to free up space and remove pictures that were in iPhoto...that were used as media by iMovie when project was under way. In short I want archive iMovie stuff

    If I back up iMovie projects to an external drive does imovie  take the media with it? I want to free up space and remove pictures that were in iPhoto...that were used as media by iMovie when project was under way. In short I want archive iMovie stuff. If I pull pics out of iPhoto, and later want to drag an archived projet bac into iMovie and the pics are no longer in iPhoto, will I be able to keep working in the project in iMovie?

    Very likely not, as the iPhoto's can be used for something else.
    More like it took a copy, or it's referencing that spot on the drive in the editable files and most likely made a copy to create a new permanent export file.
    Sample one picture and a iMovie file and see what happens.

  • I backed up my bookmarks to an external drive, rebuilt my system, and now when I try to restore from that file, I get "unsupported file type" How can I restore from this file?

    I backed up my bookmarks to an external drive, rebuilt my system, and now when I try to restore from that file, I get "unsupported file type" How can I restore from this file?

    Make sure that the backup file with the bookmarks has the correct file extension: .html for a HTML backup and .json for a JSON backup.<br />
    You can check that via the right-click context menu of that file and open the Properties.<br />
    If you are not sure about the file type then you can open the file in Firefox via "File > Open File"<br />
    A JSON backup will show as one long text line without line breaks and a HTML backup as a web page with clickable links.<br />
    A JSON backup starts with: {"title":"","id":1,"dateAdded":<br />
    An HTML backup starts with: <nowiki><!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1></nowiki>
    You may need to add quotes ("") around the name to rename the file to the correct file extension.
    See also:
    * http://kb.mozillazine.org/Backing_up_and_restoring_bookmarks_-_Firefox

  • How do I move an iTunes library from one external drive to another?

    I need to move my iTunes library from one external disk to another, because the original disk is about to fail. So, I went into iTunes Perferences --> Advanced, and set the library to a new, empty folder on the new drive.
    Nothing changed. I expected all my music to vanish from iTunes, so that I would have to re-import it. However, all the music remained, still on the old disk. At this point, if I were to recreate the library on the new disk, I would have all of my music twice.
    Is it possible to move an iTunes library from one external drive to another, or am I stuck with my original choice until I buy a new machine? If I can move it, can one of you clever folks explain how it could be done?

    Paul Seymour1 wrote:
    However, those are all dealing with old versions of iTunes that still contained the Advanced --> Consolidate Library command which is no longer part of the app. (I'm on iTunes 10.6.1.)
    Consolidate is still part of iTunes.
    It is in iTunes menu File > Library > Manage library > Consolidate.
    The article you linked to is old and it is (and was) a hacky way of doing it.
    Just copy the entire /Music/iTunes/ folder to new location, hold Option (Mac) or Shift (Windows) when launching iTunes.

  • How do I save 2 iphoto libraries onto one external drive?

    Hi
    I have an iphoto library on my MacBook Pro and I have an older library of different photos on my graphite iBook.
    I'd like to store all my photos onto one external drive.
    How can I do this without losing either library in the process?
    I actually have the same question regarding music on iTunes.
    Thanks
    AS

    Make sure the drive is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
    Do you want to merge these libraries into one? If so, then you'll need the paid version ($20) of  iPhoto Library Manager
    It's the only way to merge Libraries while preserving all metadata, versions and so on.
    Otherwise, simply rename one of the Libraries (so they don't overwite each other) and Copy the iPhoto Library from the Pictures Folder to the External Disk. in each case.
    To choose which library to open: holf down the option (or alt) key while launching iPhoto. From the resulting menu select 'Choose Library' and navigate to the new location.
    Regards
    TD

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