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So Mountain Lion server allows me to back up multiple mac computers to the one external hard drive. If the computer is running Lion does it need to be upgraded to Mountain Lion before the ML server. How to Backup a Mac to an External Hard Drive Insert your drive and use the Disk Utility app to format it. Open two Finder windows. One should show your internal drive, while the other should show.

• Can I Backup Multiple Macs To One External Drive Not Found
• Can I Backup Multiple Macs To One External Drive Disk
• Can I Backup Multiple Macs To One External Drive Located
• Can I Backup Multiple Macs To One External Drive Not Recognized

Jun 19, 2014 Install a second internal drive. Once it's installed, copy the overflow files now on the external drive to their new home. Use the external drive exclusively to backup both internal drives.

Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.

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.

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.

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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.

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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 «»

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• 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 :-) .

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.

But I DO NOT have a Mac!

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 !!!

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Backing up multiple volumes or multiple Macs to a single hard drive can be a messy proposition. If you back up each source volume to the same destination volume without some pre-planning, data from each source volume will be merged in a heap on the backup volume. Additionally, your tasks will archive or delete each other's backed up content. Carbon Copy Cloner can solve this problem! We lay out a few different scenarios and solutions below.

'I want a bootable backup for each Mac on the same hard drive'

Creating a bootable backup requires that you provide a dedicated backup volume for each Mac that you want to back up. If you want to maintain each bootable backup on the same hard drive, you simply create a partition for each computer that you want to back up using the Disk Utility application.

Related Documentation

'I want to back up my startup disk and a data volume to the same backup disk'

If you prefer not to partition your backup volume as described above, you can use two CCC backup tasks to manage these backups. The first task will back up your startup disk directly to the backup volume for a bootable backup, the second task will back up your data volume to a subfolder on the backup volume. Thanks to CCC's SafetyNet feature, the two backup tasks will coexist peacefully.

1. Configure a CCC task to back up your startup disk to the backup volume. Choose your startup disk from the Source selector and choose the backup volume from the Destination selector.
2. Verify that the SafetyNet feature is 'On'. [Note: If you have Advanced Settings enabled, be sure that the Protect root-level items option is checked.]
3. Schedule the task, if desired, or choose 'Save' from Carbon Copy Cloner's File menu. You can run this task immediately or let it run on schedule later.
4. Click the 'New Task' button in CCC's toolbar.
5. Choose your data volume from CCC's Source selector.
6. In the Finder, create a new folder at the root level of the destination volume to store your data volume's backup. Finder may prompt you to authenticate if you ran the first task already, and that's OK.
7. Drag the new folder from the Finder onto CCC's Destination selector.
8. Schedule the task, if desired, or choose 'Save' from Carbon Copy Cloner's File menu. Again, you can run this task immediately or let it run on schedule later.

Can I Backup Multiple Macs To One External Drive Not Found

CCC's SafetyNet will prevent the first task from erasing the content that you're backing up to a subfolder on that same destination volume.

'I want to back up multiple data volumes (no OS files) to the same backup disk'

The easiest way to back up multiple

Can I Backup Multiple Macs To One External Drive Disk

There are a couple options for backing up to a volume that isn't formatted as HFS+. If you're only backing up user data — files that reside in your home folder, for example, then you can back up directly to the backup volume. Non-HFS+ volumes often don't support all of the filesystem metadata that is associated with files on an HFS+ formatted volume, but that's generally OK if you aren't backing up system files or files that belong to another user account on your computer.

If you are backing up system files to a non-HFS+ formatted volume, you can back up to a disk image. A disk image is a single file residing on your hard drive that contains the entire contents of another hard drive (except for the free space). When you want to access the contents of that filesystem, you double-click on the disk image to mount the disk image as if it were an external drive attached to the machine. Carbon Copy Cloner leverages disk images to provide you the flexibility of storing several complete backups on a single shared external hard drive. To back up to a disk image:

Can I Backup Multiple Macs To One External Drive Located

1. Choose your source volume from the Source selector.
2. Select 'New disk image...' from the Destination selector.
3. Unless you're making an archival backup of your data, choose the option to create a read/write 'sparse bundle disk image' file
4. Specify the location where you want to save the disk image file.
5. When you run the backup task, CCC will create a disk image on the backup volume, back up the specified data, then unmount the disk image when the task is complete.

Can I Backup Multiple Macs To One External Drive Not Recognized

Note: While disk images themselves are not bootable, you can mount them and restore their content to a physical hard drive to produce a copy of the original volume. If the original volume was bootable, the restored volume should be able to boot the original Mac as well.

Related Documentation