Can I use time machine as a manual back-up? I plan to just set time machine off and just hit "Back Up Now" as often as I need it rather than the periodical back-ups time machine is doing automaticaly? Since we own 2 macs, a mbp and mb, can I use 1 external drive without needing to set a partition for each mac? Thanks
The short answer is yes for manual backup or backup on demand. That is what I do with my MBA and external Lacie. Not sure about the 2nd question.
1) Time Machine will by default make a backup every hour, however you can make a manual backup whenever you want. (I'm not sure if the manual backup resets the clock and every auto backup is now an hour after you make the manual back up). 2) I'm not sure about sharing one drive. How do you plan on doing that? Carry the drive back and forth between the two and hookup and backup as necessary? I think you'll need to set a partition since I think (but am not 100% on it) TM will erase the contents of the drive or partition before it makes the initial backup. You might want to experiment and see if I'm wrong and if you can achieve the results you're looking for.
Thanks, since I can do it manually, I will just hit back-up now everytime I connect the drive to either computer.
I tried it, 2 mac sharing 1 drive, it works but............ After using the external with the macbook, I plugged it in the mbp and my startup took quite a while around 3 to 4 minutes, after checking the logs I realized that my spotlight database got corrupted. So I tried to re-build it and tried it once again by pluggin external to the macbook, once again same issues. I guess I really need to buy the macbook its own external drive.
Of course you cannot back up two computers to one partitioned backup drive. Time machine works on an incremental basis after it backups the complete computer. It identifies which files have changed since the last backup and backups those files. How would it do that if you had two computers??
what's the size of your external? did you properly eject the external before using it on the mbp? you may want to check apple discussions for more 'expert advise' (not really an "apple genius" here )i haven't tried it myself, but yes, it is possible (not unless apple & the other users are lying )
Like my first question, I will use time machine as a manual back-up, in short will hit the back up now button whenever I need it to back up. So I don't connect both MAC to the external drive at the same time. The external drive is most of the time connected to the MBP since I use the other partition for storage of my work, and every other day I would eject the drive and plug in the MB to that drive for a manual back up through time machine. I am using a WD My Book Studio 750gb, set to 2 partitions first partition is for my work set at 450gb and the second partion set as a backup time machine drive at 300gb. Using FW800 connection for the MBP and FW400 for the white MB. Actually time machine works, my problem is whenever I use the drive back to the MBP the spotlight database seems to get corrupted, so if I leave the drive connected and do a re-start or when I turn on the MBP with the drive connected start up will take too long to start up. It will start up fast without the drive connected, but thats not a real solution but a workaround. Thanks
You can use a time machine drive for as many computers as you wish. My TimeCapsle has 4 different Macs using it for Time Machine and I have many clients who do the same with their external drives. It should not be an issue. Each machine will have its own sparesebundle file in that drive. No need to create multiple partitions either. And yes, you can back up manually, You need not even hit the backup now button. Just plug in the external drive and it should backup on its own.
Here is what I plan to do: 1. Remove partition from external drive 2. Update from mac 3. Rebuild my spotlight database Will post results later. Thanks
There is NO problem with backing up multiple Macs using Time Machine on one external hard disk partition, whether over the network or using a direct USB connection. You can even have a drive connected to a Mac via USB and have a second Mac back up to it over the network. You'll just notice that Macs that are backed up over USB will have folders, while those backed up over the network will have sparsebundle disk images (disk images are used for network backups so that you're free to use any filesystem format on the network drive, e.g. NTFS). @rattrapante, you might want to add your external hard disk to the drives and folders that are excluded from Spotlight searching, this will keep the drive from being indexed at all. Just go to System Preferences -> Spotlight and click on the Privacy tab. Just drag your external hard disk's icon from the Desktop to the list.
Did that, placed both partitions in the privacy tab, but after restarting, my spotlight will show indexing of both drives, so I checked spotlight preference and both partitions are still indeed in the privacy tab but why will it still index it. Honestly I am ready to give up with MAC, its been only 2 weeks I have had it, and I have done less work trying to fix all these errors, which I never had when I was using Windows. The longest I need to set-up a new windows laptop was a day or two. When I checked my console, I see so many errors upon start-up and sometimes even shut down......... Arghhhhh!
Sorry you've been having so many problems. Definitely shouldn't be happening. Have you tried running the maintenance scripts using OnyX? What version of OS X are you running?
Am running 10.5.5, the computer shipped with Leopard and I already did 2 updates from apple. Ok here what I have tried so far: Removed 2nd partition from external drive Updated from apple Repaired permissions Verify disc (no errors found on both internal and external) Restarted from scratch Time machine Manually deleted spotlight database and it re-created it. Now not only does it take too long to boot, it won't boot up entirely if the external is connected through FW800, but will work fine if I let it boot up without drive attatched and plug in external after the computer has started. I will try erasing whole external and try again, if that doesn't help my last option is to do a clean install.
does it make a difference if it's on an hourly back up or done manually? I've set it to manual a few months back since I noticed that Time machine ate up 150GB of my external's memory in 3 short months under an hourly back up. I'm not really sure if this helped.
you can use time machine editor http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/ you can configure TM to back up at your preferred interval
