Using a computer for time machine?

Can I use a g4 tower, create a RAID with the 4 drive bays and use it for time machine? Or does it have to be an external hard drive? How would I go about doing that if it does? Use firewire and boot the tower in target mode? Or can I use ethernet? Does it have to be in target mode?

Yes, you can. It will be able to be done as long as the G4 Tower is running 10.5.x. It can be set up to backup wirelessly across the network while the G4 Tower is fully open and running the normal OS (not target disk mode).
Message was edited by: alex349

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Can I use one HD for 2 computer for time machine?

I have an imac and macbook. I bought a new 500G external harddisk for time machine.. can I share the harddisk between 2 computer?
Or I have to get 2 HD for 2 computer?

happygal wrote:
and can I put my other data on the external harddisk apart from the backup from time machine?
Absolutely. Yes. You will be limiting the space available for Time Machine though. The more space available, the further back your Time Machine backup trail can go.
Kryten

HT201250 Can I partition my external hard drive and use one partion for time machine and the other one for data that i may want to use in different computers?

I have this doubt. I've just bought an external drive, especifically a Seagate GoFlex Desk 3 tb.
I want to know if it is recomendable to make a partion exclusively for time machine and let another one so I can put there music, photos, videos, etc that I should need to use or copy to another computer.
May half and half, 1.5 tb for time machine and 1.5 tb for data.
I have an internal hard drive of 500 GB (499.25 GB) in my macbook pro.
Any recommendation?

As I said, yes. Be sure your Time Machine partition has at least 1 TB for backups.
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to two (2). Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.

Can two macs use same disk for Time Machine backup with Airport Extreme?

Hi
I use a Western Digital disk as a wireless Time Machine backup connected to the USB port on my Airport Extreme and it works great. My question is: can my girlfriend use that same disk for Time Machine backup from HER computer too? (I don't mind formatting the disk if needed.)
If she can't, is it then possible to connect a USB hub and have two disks hooked up to the Airport Extreme?
Thanks for helping. I am constantly in awe of all the help people like you give people like me. Thanks!!!
Jakob

I've gone through the manual setup and the assisted setup and can't seem to get my MacBook to use the Time Machine. Any thoughts or help would be greatly appreciated.
Well, as the Jolly Giant points out....+this type of configuration is not supported by Apple+, so it's difficult, if not impossible, to provide a fix for something that Apple says that you cannot do. Reference these Apple Support documents regarding this topic:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2038
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/15139.html
Your situation is not unlike other users who try this and find that one computer may backup...(usually for a limited time before corruption issues start to creep in)...but another computer cannot backup. Count me as one of those users who thought that because things seemed to work that I had somehow "beat the system".
I started getting the corruption error messages after 4-5 weeks of successful backups, so I figured that it did not make sense to continue to try to get a second computer to backup (yes, I too could not setup a second Mac to backup).
Sorry, I could not get a second machine to backup, so can't tell you how to accomplish that goal. If you want to continue to try backing up this way, you might want to also think about a second backup strategy...just in case backups become corrupted on the WD drive.
Maybe if Apple says you cannot do this, they just may be right?
Message was edited by: Bob Timmons

Use a DMG for Time Machine Disk?

Hello everyone,
After extensive googling, it seems at first that Time Machine will not allow you to use a mounted disk image for a backup drive. I was wondering if there was a way to rig it up so that it would work, somehow disguising the mounted image as a hard drive.
My situation is as follows: I have an external FireLite Smartdisk hard drive for Time Machine backups. And yet, the drive is plenty big, while my computer's hard drive is fairly small. I want to have the backups not take up the whole drive, as they have. I attempted to partition the drive via Disk Utility, but it gave me the following error:
Partition failed with the error:
Filesystem resize support required, such as HFS+ with Journaling enabled.
I tried it with all file systems, including free space. I finally decided to try a sparse bundle disk image, with a size of 100 gb. I mounted it, went into Time Machine prefs, and it did not appear on the list of available disks.
Does anyone have any ideas?

I'd quit trying to outsmart the backup system (Time Machine is picky already) and focus on the hardware. I don't have one of those drives, but I'd be looking at why you can't repartition or format the drive. Firmware? Using a hub? Does it have a USB port you can try?
Many hard drives like the MyBook series have had problems with FW on Leopard and there are firmware updates for them. The USB ports worked fine.

Can use old macbook for Time Machine Backup?

Have an old macbook running snow leopard. Can I use it for Time Machine Back-up for my current macbook pro?

Boot your old into Target Disk mode, then plug a FireWire cable from your old to your pro. Presto! Your old's internal HD will appear in your pro's Finder as a disk on your pro. Time machine running on your pro can use it for backup. Time machine won't disturb its contents, except to add a potentially huge folder there, which will grow to fill the disk with copies of your backups. (Backing up, then) partitioning (and then restoring from backup) your old's internal hard drive will keep your pro's Time Machine from consuming all free space.

I am setting up a time machine backup to a external Hard drive. I want to backup by Mac book Pro running OSX 10.8.5. I would like to Partition the disk and use one partition for Time machine backups and the other for my Lightroom backups. How to do this?

I want to create a two partition disk. One partition for time machine, the other for Lightroom backup. Currently Time Machine is using the entire drive and it is doing the intial encryption and is about 29% complete after two days. I've decided that I want to turn encryption off and partition the disk. So I do I start over?

With the external drive attached, open Finder>Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility. Select the external drive from the list in the left side panel of the DU window. In the main window panel, click Partition in the buttons top center of that panel.
Select the number of partitions you want and adjust their sizes.
For the first partition, click to highlight the partition, then select the format, Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and then the partition table as GUID [both of those are the defaults]. Click Apply and it will ask to confirm and erase and format that partion...oh, give the partition a name, like Backup.
Then repeat those steps for the second partition..and remember to name it...something like Lightroom.
Close Disk Utilitty and you are ready to send TM to the one partition, and do your backup of Lightroom to the second partition.

Use TC 2TB for Time Machine Backup and Storage simultaneously?

Hi
I am planning to buy a TC 2TB.
I would like to know if the TC can be used as a Time Machine backup device and for storage simultaneously?
for example:
Can I use 1TB for Time Machine backups and 1TB for storage.
Please let me know if this is possible?
Thank you

I tried for ages to seek a relatively easy way to do this.. i.e. partition it, it's a huge pain! You can, but i'm pretty savvy and got bored and confused! What I did do was switch the TM back-ups to manual so they don't end up filling the disk. Trust me it's the easiest and best option!

Use ext. harddrive for time machine or just as additional storage?

I was wondering, given the problems some people have had with TM, should I maybe just use it to store stuff and free up space on my laptop, or can I use one drive for both my TM backups as well as additional storage?

Mark_Clemons wrote:
I was wondering, given the problems some people have had with TM
First, take what you read here with a grain (or large block) of salt. This is the ER for Time Machine, and no more representative of the average user's experience than your local bricks-and-mortar ER is of the health of your community. Second, most of the problems here are either misunderstandings of how TM works and how to use it; or hardware problems that would be the same with any backup app.
should I maybe just use it to store stuff and free up space on my laptop, or can I use one drive for both my TM backups as well as additional storage?
You can do both, but if you do, your best bet is to partition the drive so TM has it's own, exclusive partition. And TM can back-up the other partition. See item 5 in the +Frequently Asked Questions+ post at the top of this forum for instructions.
Still, this isn't a very good solution, as both the original and copies of those files will be on the same physical disk drive: when (not if) it fails, you may lose both. So you may want to archive those files to DVDs instead of (or in addition to) TM.

Will I loose existing data on the Time Capsule if I use it now for Time Machine also?

Till now I only save photos, music and movies on my AirPort Time Capsule 2 TB. From now on I also want to use it for Time Machine Backups also. But I am not sure if it my data and the backup will exist in parallel.

You can drag and drop files to the Time Capsule using the Finder.
Open Macintosh HD or the Finder and look for the Time Capsule icon under the SHARED heading on the left side of window.
Click on the Time Capsule icon and a folder representing the drive will appear in the window to the right.
Double click the folder to mount the drive on the desktop.

Using iPod Classic for Time Machine or Startup Disc

I have enabled my iPod to be used as external disc on iTunes. iPod icon does show up on desktop, but is not one of my options as backup volume for Time Machine, nor as an option for startup disc. Any ideas?

It can't be used as an ext drive for Time Machine.
Also, unless you are using an Intel Mac, you cannot use it as a bootable drive via USB. Only Firewire drives can be used as bootable drive on non Intel Macs and of course the iPod Classic is not a Firewire drive.

Using 1 disk for time machine and to back up and windows machine

ok so my parents need to back up their machines, my mother on a mac and my dad on a pc (has to use it for work). we have a single disk drive from OWC and im trying to figure out if i can partition it so my mom can use TM and my dad can still back up his machine on it?
if i partition it on mac both the partitions get in the journaled format, and if i leave free space on the drive it doesnt show up on mac (didnt try to see if it shows up on my dads pc)
how should i go about doing this or will it not work?
-matt

Some more info would be helpful. Depending on the Mac your mom has it should be partitioned to APM (PPC) or GUID (Intel) although this has been called into question. It should not be MBR.
The external HDD needs to be plugged into the Mac for Time Machine to work. For Time Machine, that partition needs to be formatted HFS+ (Mac OS Extended - Journaled). The PC partition may not matter as the PC should treat that partition as a network share. However, if your intent is to occasionally plug that external directly into the PC, you need to format that partition FAT/FAT32. The Mac can read and write FAT/FAT32, but it cannot write NTFS (without a paid third party app), hence why I didn't recommend that format. Leave lots of room for the TM backup (2-3 X the Mac's content) as that will gradually grow in size.

Still possible to use airport extreme for time machine?

I know apple doesn't officially support it but I remember with one of the airport utility updates, it allowed you to use an external HDD with an airport extreme for time machine backups. I tried hooking my external western digital to my airport extreme and it showed up as an airport disk, however I couldn't get time machine to access it. Is there a way I can get this to work?

I followed the instructions found on the link above and had a couple of issues:
1) Instructions state "Make sure 'Share disks over Ethernet WAN port' is checked." Could not find that check box anyplace.
2) Using first disk and then airport passwords as security, the disk does not show up in the Time Machine preferences. Am I to mount the disk first? Does not state that in the instructions.
3) If I mount the disk in the finder (security is a disk password), I am then able to see the drive in Time Machine and the back-up commences. The disk icon appears on my desktop and contains machine.sparcebundle. Another "disk" also appears on my desktop with the name "Time Machine Backups" and which contains the folder Backups.backupdb. I am also able to remotely attach to the machine doing the TM backup from another mac on the network and login.
4) Back-up started and appeared to go well (240G backed up with several partials after that) until I rebooted.
5) After reboot, it was frozen in "Making backup disk available" Opened preferences and it locked up. Had to force a reboot.
6) After restart, manually mounted the extreme external, opened Time Machine prefs, and when selecting back up location saw one with a red "∅" which I could not select and the other the extreme drive with 240G used. Attempted the back-up to the drive and I got "Making backup disk available" on the menu bar and the same message on TM system prefs with a spinning beach ball. Have been able to force quit system prefs and sent to error log to apple, but a forced reboot is still required because the TM icon on the menu continues to spin. Even a "sudu shutdown -r now" in terminal will not reboot the machine. Get to a blue screen with the spinning tick marks and it just sits there.
I wonder if the fact that I could not find "Make sure 'Share disks over Ethernet WAN port' is checked." is the issue. It does not appear to be available in the current version of the extreme base 7.4.2. Could those of you who were able to configure it with a previous version get grandfathered in? I wonder if I need to manually mount the extreme hard disk each time I reboot the machines. I am not sure how to do that but will try and see if it works.
I will be losing internet and e-mail access for a few weeks so will look at this thread again when I return.

Can multiple users use one drive for time machine

I have an older G4 which I have put a 500mb drive into. I want to put it on the newtork and use it as a time machine. Do I need to partion the drive, such that each user has there own partition? Or just one large partition and allow users access?
Thanks

see if this user tip can help: http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/26.html
JGG

Can Not Use Air Disk for Time Machine Backup

I have my Lacie 750 GB drive plugged into my AEBS, and it shows up on my network. I can not get Time Machine to recognize it so I can backup. I would appreciate any specific setup info. anyone has that can fix this problem.
Thanks -
Dudley Warner

Have you installed the most recent Airport updates? BTW, while the update now allows AEBS with a tethered drive to be used for TimeMachine Apple doesn't support it. So far I've had no trouble, backing up and restoring, but that doesn't mean there couldn't be hidden problems waiting to get us. Also, since Apple doesn't support it, if there are problems, we are on our own.

Using a computer for time machine?

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