Hello, I'm thinking about getting a 4TB external USB hard drive to hook up to my Netgear Nighthawk router to do both windows and time machine backups. I have a windows PC, a MacBook Pro, and an iMac. I want to make a 2TB partition for the windows box, a 1.5 TB partition for the iMac, and a 500GB partition for the MacBook. Is it possible to do this and have them all back up over the network. If so, how do I need to go about formatting all of these partitions?
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Doing Time Machine and Windows backups on a shared network drive
- Thread starter SheepNutz
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I would check first to see if you can even backup to a regular network drive using time machine or windows.
My understanding was that only a time capsule would let you back up to an attached drive (later an ac model airport express also allowed this), but other network drives (such as attached to a net gear router) were not allowed.
I believe that drobo and WD cloud drives are advertised to also work with time machine, so it may be possible now, but I would research first, as they may be running special software or services to allow it.
Windows 7 would also not allow me to backup to a network drive when I was using it, unless I paid to upgrade to a higher system level. This may have changed in later windows versions however.
Best of luck.
My understanding was that only a time capsule would let you back up to an attached drive (later an ac model airport express also allowed this), but other network drives (such as attached to a net gear router) were not allowed.
I believe that drobo and WD cloud drives are advertised to also work with time machine, so it may be possible now, but I would research first, as they may be running special software or services to allow it.
Windows 7 would also not allow me to backup to a network drive when I was using it, unless I paid to upgrade to a higher system level. This may have changed in later windows versions however.
Best of luck.
Netgear R7000? That does support Time Machine, so just format in whatever format the router manual suggests for external drives. The Mac won't care what format the drive is in. It will just put the backups inside a sparse bundle image for each Mac.
