Can I Backup Multiple Macs To One External Drive

• Can I Backup Multiple Macs To One External Drive Backup
• Can I Backup Multiple Macs To One External Drives

Helping people with computers. one answer at a time.

• You cannot, however, connect two computers directly to the drive by USB, eSATA or Firewire. External hard drives can only be connected to one computer, and they can then be set up for sharing over.
• To see the size of a specific file or folder, click it once and then press Command-I. To see storage information about your Mac, click the Apple menu in the top-left of your screen. Choose About This Mac and click the Storage tab. For Time Machine backups, it's good to use a drive that has at least twice the storage capacity of your Mac.

It's possible to place the backups for multiple machines onto a single external hard drive; I'll look at the issues and why you might not want to do this.

A 1 Terabyte external hard drive could hold backup data for multiple computers. Each computer's backups would be stored in a subfolder on the drive. But how should you connect the external drive to all of those computers? You could carry the drive from one machine to another, plugging it into a USB port on each machine. But that is rather tedious. Occasionally (every few months) I'll unplug the external hard-disk from my Mac and use Time Machine to backup my wife's Mac. Hence, two Macs, both using the same hard-drive to backup to. Recently there is only the space on the disk for Time Machine to keep backups of my Mac from the previous day.

by Leo A. Notenboom, © 2011

I'm new at this backing up stuff. I've lost some information over the last few years, but I don't put my life on my computers. I'm old fashioned and keep PAPER copies, DVD, and CD Hard copies. Anyway, I was wondering if you can mix your formats on say a one-terabyte 'My Book Essentials' external hard drive. I want to put two computers and one lap top on it and ALL of them have less than 50 GB each, so a total of approximately 150 GBs. Now my problem is, one is a Windows 7 SP-1, XP Pro SP3, And a MACBook Pro SnowLep. current version. What would be the best division of the one-terabyte hard drive and can I format the division for the MAC by itself ? I just want to clone all of my HDs as they are now. Is this even possible? Like Clone, Backup, Bootdisk needed, which program do I need to do these things with? I guess I want to clone my HDs in case they crash or they get infected by a bad virus and I want to just be able to put a clean operating system back in its place with all my programs working as they are today. I have free Avast on the Win. 7 machine and free Avira on the XP and free Sophos on the MacBook plus a ton of anti-spyware, like SuperAntiSpyware Pro, CCleaner, etc.

•

The short answer is that it's quite possible to place more than onemachine's backup on a single external drive. I'll admit up front that the Mac'sgoing to throw me a bit of a curve because I'm not that Mac-savvy. Perhaps someof my readers will chime in with some suggestions.

I'll review the tools, terminology, and, perhaps as important, the habits thatyou'll need to adopt for this to be successful.

•

Terminology

While 'clone' is somewhat correct, what I believe that you really want is moreproperly called a 'system image' backup, along with periodic incrementalbackups to save your most recent work.

A 'clone' most commonly refers to a sector-by-sector copy of the hard drive- copying everything, even the empty space on the drive. (There's no formaldefinition of the term, and some may use it to mean a copy of only the data.) Aclone is a complete image, and not something that can be updated. If your datachanges, as it will as you use your computer, then to back it up, you would need tocreate an entirely new clone of the drive.

That's both time consuming and somewhat wasteful.

A 'system image', as I and many others use the term, is a copy of all thedata on your hard drive including the operating system, programs, data andwhatever else that might be there when the backup is taken. Most programs thatallow you to take a system image backup also provide for the ability to takewhat are called 'incremental' backups; copying only those files that havechanged since the immediately previous backup.

Creating a periodic system image, say once a month, and then augmenting thatwith a daily incremental backups gets you the best of both worlds: a completebackup of everything on your system that uses both your time and your diskspace more efficiently.

Organization

For a Windows-only scenario, I'd advise simply creating a single partition onan external hard disk and, in that partition, creating a folder for each machine that you plan to back up. Backups are simply stored as files, and thus, you can name,organize, and place them in whatever way makes sense to you.

You'd then configure the backup software on each machine to place thebackups in that machine's associated folder. That'll keep all the backupsorganized by machine, while keeping them on the single external hard drive.

Mac's Time Machine - the excellent backup software included with Mac OSX -throws a wrinkle into this: I believe that Time Machine requires completeownership of the backup drive, and uses a a Mac-specific (if not TimeMachine-specific) hard disk format.

I believe, and the Mac folks will have to help me out here, that you couldpartition that external hard drive and dedicate one of the partitions for TimeMachine's use and the other partition for the rest of your Windows-basedmachines.

Software

Time Machine is the standard on Macs. I really don't have reason torecommend anything else.

For Windows-based machines (XP, Vista and 7), I use Macrium Reflect.

Naturally, there are other programs that can do the job as well, and it'sworth it to do the research to find out which ones. Macrium has worked well for me. The key is that whatever software that you choose should be able to:

• Take a complete system image of the entire computer, not just your data.

• Support the ability to perform periodic incremental backups.

• Include the ability to do what's called a 'bare metal restore'.

That last point is worth discussing in a little more detail.

Bare Metal Restore

Imagine that your computer's hard drive dies, and is completely unrecoverable. Toast. Allyou can do is replace it.

You're not worried, though, because you've been carefully backing up every dayas I've described above. You have a full-system image and a few incrementalbackups taken since that are ready to go on your external hard drive.

The computer won't boot because the replacement hard drive is empty. Yet, youneed to run your backup software in order to restore your backups to thedrive.

The solution goes by many names, but I call it 'bootable rescue media'.

The software that you use to back up should include or allow you to create abootable CD - your bootable rescue media. You make this when things areworking and save it for the day you need it. You can also make it using adifferent computer. When it comes time to restore your backups to your new,empty hard drive, you boot from the rescue media, a version of your backupsoftware runs, and you use that to then restore the backup from your externaldrive.

Whatever solution you use, make sure that it can do that or you won't be able torestore when you need it most.

Those Habits I Mentioned.

There's one problem with the specific scenario that you've described: you need tophysically move the hard disk from machine to machine in order to enable eachmachine to backup to it.

Absolutely, positively something that can be done.

And it's also extremely easy to forget.

Yes, it's possible to attach the hard drive to a single computer and thenshare that hard disk so that other computers might use it. The problem is thatthese backups are typically large (especially that periodic system image) andnetworks are slow compared to direct connections. Again, it can be done, butnetworking can at times be problematic and possibly too slow to be practical,depending on your configuration.

And, again Mac folks can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Time Machinerequires that the drive be directly connected to your Mac.

So, you need to develop a very good habit of moving the external drive frommachine to machine to ensure that backups are happening on all.

Or.

Drives are relatively cheap.

Get one for each machine and avoid several issues all at once.

Article C4782 - April 1, 2011 «»

You may also be interested in:

• What backup program should I use? Backing up your computer's data is critical. What program should you use? There are many, but the best is which ever one you actually will use.

• What's an incremental backup? Backing up is important, but terms like 'full', 'incremental' and even 'differential' can easily confuse. We'll look at what these terms mean.

• Can't I just copy everything instead of using a backup program? It's tempting to just use file copy tools to backup what you think you need. But if you're not careful, you could easily miss something very important.

• Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect 5.0 A series of articles with instructions and videos demonstrating the steps required to install, backup and restore your computer using Macrium Reflect 5.0.

Hi - thanks for this useful article.
Like you, I'm not Mac-savvy, but my wife is a Mac enthusiast and insisted on getting a Macbook with Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) which, as you say, includes Time Machine.

I have a huge spare external USB hard drive so I first divided it into 2 non-equal partitions using Windows, Partition magic or whatever software, and then connected the drive to the Mac. After a bit of thought, Mac offered to format some or all of the partitions it found. I told it which one to use, and Time Machine has been running happily ever since.

In this case with 2 Windows PCs and one Mac, I would still use only two partitions. Use partition A for all Windows backups and partition B for Mac backups, and create one folder in partition A in which to store all backups for each PC (eg create folders PC1 & PC2).

You probably want partition A to be 70% of the hard drive and B to be 30%. The reason for having them different sizes is so you know for certain which is which as you don't want to re-format the wrong one by mistake :-) . Aristocrat casino games.

The first thing you want to get when backing up a mac is a piece of software called CarbonCopyCloner. It will back up everything and if your mac is capable of booting from a USB drive it can boot from your backup.

Hello,

I am a both a pc and a mac user and I can shed some light about backing up.

Time machine (built into Snow Leopard) is a great choice because well, it is free (again built into snow leopard). You will want to partition your hard drive (which Snow Leopard will do) to the format called Mac OS Extended (journaled). That is the only format TM (Time machine from now own because I am lazy) will use.

As far as how to backup multiple computers at one I've networked my external hd to my router via usb. As long as your mac can see the external (it will show either in finder under shared or on the desktop), time machine is ready to go. Also, You can purchase a router from Apple called Time Capsule, which has a 1TB or 2TB drive built in (as well as a usb port to add additional HDs). I agree with the previous reader by saying keep your partitions to 2. One for your pcs and one for your mac. Be aware that Apple does recommend for time machine you use an external HD that is twice the size of your mac's hd, but TM does delete the oldest backup when it runs out of room on the partition or drive. Hope that helps

I have 'stuff' from three dif 'puters on one external hardrive. I just created a 'Folder' for each dif 'puter that I save/transfer to; in each 'Folder' I create 'Files'. same as when saving anything on my 'puter's harddrive.

I find no problems with using my 500GB Seagate External Harddrive this way. How to find a mac adddress on alexa dot.

But I DO NOT have a Mac!

Can I Backup Multiple Macs To One External Drive Backup

In a society where at any point in time millions of automobiles are polluting the air in drive thrus because people will not do something as simple as park and walk in to get something, backing up is another 'casualty' of laziness. Backups that you leave connected to a computer only protect you against one thing: original hard disk failure. They do not protect you against fire, equipment theft, or viral attacks. Face it, the only true protection is to connect the backup device each time, do the backup, then disconnect the device and store it away from the data it copied. PERIOD !!!

•

Comments on this entry are closed.

If you have a question, start by using the search box up at the top of the page - there's a very good chance that your question has already been answered on Ask Leo!.

If you don't find your answer, head out to http://askleo.com/ask to ask your question.

Why backup multiple computers on one external drive?

Nowadays, one family holds usually more than one computer for different uses. Each computer,more or less, stores important data that needs to be backed up. So if disaster occurs, thereis a way to get the data back. Well, so many devices could be used as the backup storage,why choose one and only one external hard drive as the destination path?

Generally speaking, user who hasn't purchase an external disk may think about backing upthese computers to other storages, such as cloud storage and NAS. Truthfully, these two arenot bad choices for large scale computers backup.

However, compared with external hard drive, there are two factors you need to pay attentionto. One is the backup speed. Backing up files especially large-sized filesto cloud takes up a lot of time. The other is storage price. For mostfamilies, it is a little bit wasteful to purchase a NAS for home computer backups. Foroffice backup, it is not a bad choice though.

External drive ranks among the best of optional backup storages. It is easy to carry due toits portable property. An external hard drive with 1TB or 2TB capacity is affordable formost PC users. It is quite easy to backup one computer toexternal drive, so some users tend to purchase as many external drives as computers.

Equipping each PC with one external drive is acceptable so long as there are enough budgets.But from common perspective, that is costly and to some extent hard to manage.

Now that it is possible to backup multiple computers to one external drive, why not? Now,let's learn how to backup more than one computer to a single external drive in details.

How to backup multiple computers on one external hard drive?

It is important to know that the external hard drive you are going to used as the backupstorage should be large enough to store at least all the files you want to backup, let alonelater scheduled backup with backup scheme.

Solutions are different when you buy different external hard drives. For instance, there arenetwork type external drive and USB type external drive on the market. Network type externaldrive like Seagate FreeAgent has bundled backup software that allows its user to backupmultiple computers with unique computer name to separate directories of the drive.

Each directory's name is named after each computer's name. It also has tutorial to guide youdo the backup. Such backup solution really helps a lot yet it needs software license or thelike in most cases.

Play real blackjack online. The other USB type external hard drive is the most common one in our daily life. It can beconnected to any computer via USB cable and USB port. The drawback of this type externaldisk is that it can only connect to one computer at a time. Obviously, we need to find a wayto let it become the backup storage of all computers' files.

Auto backup two computers to one external drive in Windows 7

A low tech way is to create sub-folders for each computer on the external drive, connect itto one computer and backup it to the corresponding sub-folder. Keep moving the external backand forth between computers every few days so they each get a chance to backup. This is theeasiest way yet it needs more time and effort.

If these computers are all in the same segment of LAN and they can 'see' each other inNetwork like picture below, things would be better. We can set the external drive as networkshared that is available for all computers in LAN. Then choose a backup utility like AOMEI Backupper Professional to backup computer tonetwork location.

It allows you backup system, entire disk andsingle files to external disk. File sync is also available. Sounds simple, isn't it? Keepreading to learn the specific steps.

Can I Backup Multiple Macs To One External Drives

Hi - thanks for this useful article.
Like you, I'm not Mac-savvy, but my wife is a Mac enthusiast and insisted on getting a Macbook with Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) which, as you say, includes Time Machine.

I have a huge spare external USB hard drive so I first divided it into 2 non-equal partitions using Windows, Partition magic or whatever software, and then connected the drive to the Mac. After a bit of thought, Mac offered to format some or all of the partitions it found. I told it which one to use, and Time Machine has been running happily ever since.

In this case with 2 Windows PCs and one Mac, I would still use only two partitions. Use partition A for all Windows backups and partition B for Mac backups, and create one folder in partition A in which to store all backups for each PC (eg create folders PC1 & PC2).

You probably want partition A to be 70% of the hard drive and B to be 30%. The reason for having them different sizes is so you know for certain which is which as you don't want to re-format the wrong one by mistake :-) . Aristocrat casino games.

The first thing you want to get when backing up a mac is a piece of software called CarbonCopyCloner. It will back up everything and if your mac is capable of booting from a USB drive it can boot from your backup.

Hello,

I am a both a pc and a mac user and I can shed some light about backing up.

Time machine (built into Snow Leopard) is a great choice because well, it is free (again built into snow leopard). You will want to partition your hard drive (which Snow Leopard will do) to the format called Mac OS Extended (journaled). That is the only format TM (Time machine from now own because I am lazy) will use.

As far as how to backup multiple computers at one I've networked my external hd to my router via usb. As long as your mac can see the external (it will show either in finder under shared or on the desktop), time machine is ready to go. Also, You can purchase a router from Apple called Time Capsule, which has a 1TB or 2TB drive built in (as well as a usb port to add additional HDs). I agree with the previous reader by saying keep your partitions to 2. One for your pcs and one for your mac. Be aware that Apple does recommend for time machine you use an external HD that is twice the size of your mac's hd, but TM does delete the oldest backup when it runs out of room on the partition or drive. Hope that helps

I have 'stuff' from three dif 'puters on one external hardrive. I just created a 'Folder' for each dif 'puter that I save/transfer to; in each 'Folder' I create 'Files'. same as when saving anything on my 'puter's harddrive.

I find no problems with using my 500GB Seagate External Harddrive this way. How to find a mac adddress on alexa dot.

But I DO NOT have a Mac!

Can I Backup Multiple Macs To One External Drive Backup

In a society where at any point in time millions of automobiles are polluting the air in drive thrus because people will not do something as simple as park and walk in to get something, backing up is another 'casualty' of laziness. Backups that you leave connected to a computer only protect you against one thing: original hard disk failure. They do not protect you against fire, equipment theft, or viral attacks. Face it, the only true protection is to connect the backup device each time, do the backup, then disconnect the device and store it away from the data it copied. PERIOD !!!

•

Comments on this entry are closed.

If you have a question, start by using the search box up at the top of the page - there's a very good chance that your question has already been answered on Ask Leo!.

If you don't find your answer, head out to http://askleo.com/ask to ask your question.

Why backup multiple computers on one external drive?

Nowadays, one family holds usually more than one computer for different uses. Each computer,more or less, stores important data that needs to be backed up. So if disaster occurs, thereis a way to get the data back. Well, so many devices could be used as the backup storage,why choose one and only one external hard drive as the destination path?

Generally speaking, user who hasn't purchase an external disk may think about backing upthese computers to other storages, such as cloud storage and NAS. Truthfully, these two arenot bad choices for large scale computers backup.

However, compared with external hard drive, there are two factors you need to pay attentionto. One is the backup speed. Backing up files especially large-sized filesto cloud takes up a lot of time. The other is storage price. For mostfamilies, it is a little bit wasteful to purchase a NAS for home computer backups. Foroffice backup, it is not a bad choice though.

External drive ranks among the best of optional backup storages. It is easy to carry due toits portable property. An external hard drive with 1TB or 2TB capacity is affordable formost PC users. It is quite easy to backup one computer toexternal drive, so some users tend to purchase as many external drives as computers.

Equipping each PC with one external drive is acceptable so long as there are enough budgets.But from common perspective, that is costly and to some extent hard to manage.

Now that it is possible to backup multiple computers to one external drive, why not? Now,let's learn how to backup more than one computer to a single external drive in details.

How to backup multiple computers on one external hard drive?

It is important to know that the external hard drive you are going to used as the backupstorage should be large enough to store at least all the files you want to backup, let alonelater scheduled backup with backup scheme.

Solutions are different when you buy different external hard drives. For instance, there arenetwork type external drive and USB type external drive on the market. Network type externaldrive like Seagate FreeAgent has bundled backup software that allows its user to backupmultiple computers with unique computer name to separate directories of the drive.

Each directory's name is named after each computer's name. It also has tutorial to guide youdo the backup. Such backup solution really helps a lot yet it needs software license or thelike in most cases.

Play real blackjack online. The other USB type external hard drive is the most common one in our daily life. It can beconnected to any computer via USB cable and USB port. The drawback of this type externaldisk is that it can only connect to one computer at a time. Obviously, we need to find a wayto let it become the backup storage of all computers' files.

Auto backup two computers to one external drive in Windows 7

A low tech way is to create sub-folders for each computer on the external drive, connect itto one computer and backup it to the corresponding sub-folder. Keep moving the external backand forth between computers every few days so they each get a chance to backup. This is theeasiest way yet it needs more time and effort.

If these computers are all in the same segment of LAN and they can 'see' each other inNetwork like picture below, things would be better. We can set the external drive as networkshared that is available for all computers in LAN. Then choose a backup utility like AOMEI Backupper Professional to backup computer tonetwork location.

It allows you backup system, entire disk andsingle files to external disk. File sync is also available. Sounds simple, isn't it? Keepreading to learn the specific steps.

Can I Backup Multiple Macs To One External Drives

1. Attach your external drive to one of the computers first. If it is a new drive, you needto formathard drive before you can use it. Find the external drive in Windows Explorer,create several folders for each computer and you can name the folder after computer's nameor just numbers.

2. In Windows Explorer, right click the backup drive and select Properties >Sharing. You'll find Not Shared under Network Path. Click AdvancedSharing and check Share this folder box in the pop-up window. Youare allowed input comments here. Be sure to click Permissions.

3. In the Permission dialog, make sure Full control, Change and Read all haveAllow checked. Then click Apply to save the change.

4. Back to the Properties window, you can see the network path of this drive is'Aomei-pcf' in this example. Keep it in mind because you'll need it later.

Note: This action will make any machine on the local network have fullaccess to this drive, for example read and write to it. It's still protected by the securitysoftware on the machine it's connected to, and it's still behind the routers firewall soit's inaccessible from the Internet.

5. Download, install and run AOMEI Backupper on both computers. Follow these steps to backupmultiple computers to one external drive. For example, click on File Backup.Select files and folders you want to backup via Add File or AddFolder and then click to select a network path.

6. At this page, click Add Network Location and then input theaforementioned network path to open the backup folder.

7. Click Schedule to set regular and auto backup with Daily, Weekly, Monthlyand Event-trigger. Finally, click Start Backup to run the backup.

Important: if you unplug and re-plug the external drive after sharing, thedrive letter could be assigned to a different one, which will cause the backup destinationpath inaccessible and invalid. So take caution with that behavior.

Tips:

• You can set email notification and password protected in Options.

• Scheme can help you manage destination storage by auto deleting oldbackups.

• System Backup, Disk Backup, Partition Backup and File Sync are available as well.

• The follow-up backup work can also be done using Windows Backup and Restore whichsurely provides limited function compared with AOMEI Backupper.

Important notice: if you've mapped an external hard drive as networkdrive, it is better to use AOMEICentralized Backupper to centralized backup multiple clients (computers) to theexternal drive from one console easily and quickly.

Summary

Can you backup multiple computers to one external hard drive and even automatically? I'm sureyou have had answer for the question after this tutorial. As covered before, many solutionscan help you reach the goal, just select the most suitable one for yourself.

The backup software in the example also has the ability to backup multiple hard drivesto external drive under same Windows operating system. You may want to download (Windows 10, 8/8.1, 7, XP and Vista compatible)this tool and learn more.

If you want to protect unlimited computers within your company, you can pick AOMEI Backupper Technician. With the inbuilt AOMEI ImageDeploy tool, you are also allowed to deploy/restore system image file on server-sidecomputer to multiple client-side computers over network.