Time Machine and two macs

[carl201167]

I have two macbooks in the house and would like to use Time Machine to back them up, but I am confused:

1. Can I buy one external drive and just plug each macbook in at separate times. i.e. there won't be any TM confusion about two different macs. I'm hoping to avoid buying two drives

2. Is Time Machine practical for laptops? i.e. Can I plug in the laptops to the external drive say weekly to get a regular backup or need they be connected all the time?

Thanks

[swiftaw]

I think you would have to partition the hard drive into two partitions, one for each machine.

[carl201167]

Forgive my ignorance - is that easy to do?

[swiftaw]

Originally Posted by carl201167

Forgive my ignorance - is that easy to do?

Use, very simple using Disk Utility in your Applications/Utilities folder

[Persifleur]

You don't need two partitions. So long as your Macs do not share the same computer name they can happily coexist on the same disk.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html

Back up the whole family.
The moment you choose a Time Machine drive, a single folder is created on the drive. Inside this folder is a subfolder for each Mac being backed up. (Yes, multiple Mac systems can share the same backup drive.) And within each subfolder is another list of folders — one for every backup performed on that Mac. Time Machine uses a standard file system to store all of its information. Nothing hidden anywhere.

To answer your second question, no the disk doesn't need to be connected all the time. If the disk isn't plugged into the laptop at the time the backup was meant to commence, it will be deferred until the such time the drive is plugged in.

[carl201167]

Thanks Persifleur - very useful

[redAPPLE]

i have this external drive with fw400 and fw800.

has anyone tried to use one external drive simultaneously to backup 2 macs?

is it possible to backup both macs at once? without unplugging the drive?

[Kolind]

I tried doing the same thing - didn't work unfortunately

I also found out that it's a bad idea to swap the cable from one machine to the other (even though the first one was asleep) without ejecting it from the first one - I had to reformat the entire disk to get it working again...