multiple mac time machine backups on one drive

[Sossity]

can I have multiple time machine backups from more than onemac on a single hard drive? or is it better to have each mac with their own timemachine backup drive?

 

[priitv8]

You can, but it really will work well on network-drive. Otherwise you will need to constantly run rounds with your USB-drive to each individual machine.
http://www.apple.com/shop/question/...ate-macs-using-time-machine/QTPX47UDACDCPD94U

 

[Weaselboy]

can I have multiple time machine backups from more than onemac on a single hard drive? or is it better to have each mac with their own timemachine backup drive?

Sure.. just make two partitions on the drive, one for each Mac. Other than having to move the disks back and forth, it is no worse than two disks. I guess you have the issue of the one drive failing and losing both backups.

 

[priitv8]

Sure.. just make two partitions on the drive, one for each Mac.

Is this absolutely necessary? I understand that TimeMachine will create separate folder per machine name inside the Backups.backupdb folder.
On a network drive it goes even easier - one sparsebundle per machine.

 

[Weaselboy]

Is this absolutely necessary? I understand that TimeMachine will create separate folder per machine name inside the Backups.backupdb folder.
On a network drive it goes even easier - one sparsebundle per machine.

You are correct, but I like the two partitions better because you can manage the space used better. With them on one volume each volume is competing for the same space. Either will work though.

 

[matreya]

can I have multiple time machine backups from more than onemac on a single hard drive? or is it better to have each mac with their own timemachine backup drive?

You can backup more than one mac to a Time Machine hard disk but it's literally putting all your backup 'eggs' into one basket - I'd recommend at least having a portable hard drive for each Mac to act as a single time machine backup for that particular Mac. 1 and 2 TB portable hard drives are pretty cheap these days.