“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.