Time Machine advise needed

[tollickd]

I currently have an mac mini with SL (I am going to upgrade this to lion/server at the end of the month) I am also buying a new MacBook Pro.

My question is I have an external 500GB drive that I want to use as a time machine, would I be able to connect this to my mac mini via usb and some how use it wirelessly to do a time machine back up from my MacBook pro over wifi?

Also would I be able to have it back up both macs on the same drive? or would I need to have two drives?

 

[nippyjun]

You can back up macs with time machine to the one drive, but 500gb isn't that big these days and you may wind up filling it up quickly with 2 macs.

I don't know about wireless time machine.

 

[blueroom]

Drop the drive into a NAS that supports Lions Time Machine (Synology, QNAP).

 

[smirk]

You could partition the external into two partitions, then set up file sharing on one of them. The mini would back up to the unshared partition, and your Macbook Pro would back up to the shared one over wifi.

I don't recommend this, for two reasons. First, like others have said, you'll quickly run out of disk space. And second, Time Machine is less than reliable over wireless. I'd argue that it's less than reliable in general, but extra less over wireless.