New to time machine questions

[stekerrod]

hi guys, ive got a external hard drive on the way to use for time machine back ups but i have a couple of questions i'd appreciate answering.....

1/ can i use the same hard drive to back up more than one mac using time machine?

2/ if i backp everything off my iMac then want to do a clean install on the iMacs hard drive how to i re-instate everything back to its original place when leopard is re-installed?

thanks as always guys

 

[ryanmcd02]

1. Yes, I would partition the drive with Disk Utility first and allocate amounts of memory to each Time Machine. I would also create a partition for non-time machine/simple storage use.

Haven't done the second one myself, but when I changed computers about a month ago I manually moved everything that I wanted after copying everything to an external. I prefer this as a way of 'cleaning house' while moving, but by backing up everything you don't have to worry about losing something you will want later. Also, backing up this way allows you to have your own file structure for when you want to save something big (such as a 7 GB movie) but you don't want to save it on your iMac's HD.