We have 2 older (2006 I think) Imac's with snow leopard and a 2011 mac book air 11 with Lion. I have on my imac a lot of music and photos. I would like to be able to move the music, photos and other important information to a external hard drive for safe keeping and or use by all 3 computers if needed.
What is the best for what I want to do or am I going about this the wrong way. I have been thinking about this for awhile and would like you knowledgeable computer guys to give me some ideas.
It depends a bit on how much data there is, and how you work with it. Moving around external harddrives are kind of messy, and risky, imho. You can easily drop them, lose them, or just find yourself working less with the content because you don't feel like fetching that hardddrive from another machine at that moment.
Personally I use a 50GB Dropbox account (99 USD a year)- so everything is synced between all machines without me having to do anything. It's lovely neat, and also makes sharing with friends and collaboriating on work really easy.
It implies though, that you need local copies on all machines. Which you may not want on a MBA, since they usually have small SSDs.
You could set one of the iMac up to serve all the content via the network, if it's fast enough for what you do. For me, browsing thousands of RAW format 12 Mpix pictures over WiFi is just too slow. But with smaller JPGs it should be fine.
There are tons of solutions for this, every one with its strengths and weaknesses. If you descibe more thoroughly what apps you use, how much data there is, how your ideal setup would look like (not considering money), I can try to recommend something, I've tried more than a few solutions.
