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the advisor

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 16, 2008
39
0
Long Island
The purpose of this question is to find a simple solution as to how to use a shared external hard drive as a (mountable) time machine backup location.

The setup is as follows: In the office I have my modem connected to a Linksys WRN160 wireless router. I have a PB G4 plugged into the router via ethernet, with a (shared) FW800 external HD plugged into the PB. The PB is set up as somewhat of a 'server' in the sense that it hosts the printing and shared storage, and operates closed 99% of the time. Floating around the house are three other apple laptops of the garden variety.

I have the drive shared, and am able to access (will not mount on the desktop) it for purposes of a common data storage location, but have been unable to set the drive up as a mountable backup location. I have searched the interwebs and have one been able to come back with very complex solutions to this problem. It seems that it would be a very simple thing to accomplish. Any help is greatly appreciated!
 
Is the PB wth the drive attached running Leopard? That is a requirement for Time Machine on another machine to "see" the drive. There are tricks to get around this but I wouldn't trust them, and you certainly would not get support from Apple in such a case.
 
So if I wanted to back up multiple machines, is it plausible to just partition the drive and have each machine backup to a different partition? Logically this makes sense, however I have learned that it does not mean that it will work.
 
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