How best to back up two Macs to one TM external drive

Dudes,
I have a white MacBook 1.83 running Leopard and a new Air (rev a) also running Leopard.
I have a wireless network through my Airport Express.
I currently backup the MacBook using TM via FW to an external drive.
How best to back the Air up to this drive too?
Shall I just USB it in, or........................
Can I mount the external drive on my MacBook desktop, then - via filesharing - point the Air's TM towards this? This would save another lead down the back of the desk and lots of tedious plugging in.
But can it be done?
Thanks
Johnnycakes

VA2020 wrote:
You can certainly backup your MacBook Air (MBA) to your FW HDD attached to your MacBook if it has Leopard (i.e. Time Machine). Just enable file sharing to that drive for the MBA.
Thanks very much - I'll give it a try.
Even if your external HDD has USB, if you plan on doing wireless backups, the backup format of a Time Machine backup for a locally connected drive (connect via USB) is incompatible with that of a TM backup over a network (the MBA wireless backing up to the external HDD connected to the MacBook). You cannot switch over later.
Thanks - I didn't know that! So if I start of doing wireless backups, I either have to keep going with it, or start over if I chose to switch to USB?
It's too bad you don't have the AirPort Extreme Base Station. A USB HDD could then have been connected to the Extreme and shared by all network users and also be connected via ethernet. Now, the MacBook has to be on for the MBA to backup.
Yes, am thinking that the Airport Extreme or Time Capsule might be the way forward...
One last thing - Peter Miller mentioned that backing up wirelessly, in his opinion, wasn't as stable as a wired USB backup - what's your (or other people's) opinion on this?
Thanks

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