“Ed Bernard has all the right pieces, but wasn’t able to find a straightforward explanation for backing up his three Macs to a single external drive that he’s attached to one of them,” Glenn Fleishman writes for Macworld. “Here’s how to do that.”
“First, attach the hard drive to the Mac you want to act as the Time Machine ‘hub,'” Fleishman writes. “This should be a desktop machine and, preferably, one that’s connected via ethernet to your home network. Wi-Fi will work, but the amount of backup data passing over even the latest, fastest Wi-Fi flavor may bog down other simultaneous network activity.”
Fleishman writes, “Second, make sure your external volume has been formatted ideally for Time Machine…”
Complete, easy-to-follow instructions in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ve done just this and it works well. In one location, for example, we have an iMac acting as the “hub” with a MacBook and a 13-inch MacBook Air backing up via Time Machine to a single drive.
This article is here because pretty soon, people won’t be able to buy Time Capsules. They’ll have to make their own.
I have a cheesegrater 2008 Mac Pro that I use to back up a Macbook and a Mini with SSD, using both Time Machine and
Carbon Copy Cloner.
I don’t have good luck with all of the menu-swapping alphabet soup configuration methods mentioned in the article.
It was just so much easier to go back to my old way of starting the Mac Pro in Target mode, the 4 drives on the Mac Pro “just show up”
It so much reminds me of the good old days when my company had as many as 8 Macs. When we bought a new one, we plugged it in, turned it on, and wonder of wonders it just showed up on the network. Ah, those were great days.
Time Machine has had multiple issues from glitches that complicate life for me to the point of not using it a long time ago. Carbon Copy Cloner has NEVER had a glitch in over a decade.
Is Time Machine any better today?
I use Time Machine primarily for looking for older versions of documents and that has worked ok. It’s easy to access while you are working on a particular document, that’s about its only advantage.
Have never needed it for a complete restore. Carbon Copy Cloner is faster.
An easier method that I implemented two years ago was to upgrade the macOS on my primary machine (27″ iMac with an external drive) to macOS Server. Then run Time Machine Server as a service on your primary Mac. This is a much safer approach for multiple Mac backups because Server is a more robust application that was built for this task.
I have a Drobo 5N which is connected to a Mac Mini. It has 2 shares. One, Time Machine capable and the other for my burgeoning iTunes library. All 3 Macs in the house are backed up.
The only downside is that the iTunes library is not backed up by TM. However the data drives are redundant so if a drive goes down, data is still intact.