Airport extreme, external USB and time machine

[bawjohnson]

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to run my situation by you experts,

I teach Music Technology and have 2 Macs (A G5 and a Mac mini) in my studio which Students use to complete work - Currently they have to save locally on each Mac and I back up each to a 1 TB USB drive using time machine to back up their work.

Currently Students have to transfer their saved files from one computer to another using a pen drive or similar if they wish to continue working on a different Mac, so I'm looking at the solution of attaching the 1TB external USB drive to an airport extreme and pupils saving their work to this so they can access it from either Mac.

My question's this - how would I best then back the external 1Tb drive up? could it be done using time machine somehow, or am I better using carbon copy cloner or similar?

Thanks,

Ben

 

[GGJstudios]

My question's this - how would I best then back the external 1Tb drive up? could it be done using time machine somehow, or am I better using carbon copy cloner or similar?

My preference is Carbon Copy Cloner for all backups.

 

[marzer]

To minize your HW investment you could create an adhoc network between the machines (cable or wireless), then use something like Chronosync/Chronoagent to keep the machines in constant sync and then share the 1TB from one of the machines (preferrably the fastest) so both can backup to it via Time Machine.

 

[bawjohnson]

To minize your HW investment you could create an adhoc network between the machines (cable or wireless), then use something like Chronosync/Chronoagent to keep the machines in constant sync and then share the 1TB from one of the machines (preferrably the fastest) so both can backup to it via Time Machine.

Thanks for the replies guys - this sounds like what I'm after marzer, but does the Mac which the 1TB's attached to need to be on and booted up for the other to access it?

 

[marzer]

Thanks for the replies guys - this sounds like what I'm after marzer, but does the Mac which the 1TB's attached to need to be on and booted up for the other to access it?

Yes, left on and booted, but you can log off any users if that's an issue, and it will continue to file share. Also, letting it sleep should be okay, file requests should wake it up.

 

[LFMNX]

Since this is music technology will there be real time recording involved where you need fast write speeds? Or is this saving some other type of user files?