time machine set up plan

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Hey all,

Here is the deal: I have one external drive (2TB) attached to an airport extreme. I use this drive exclusively for time machine backups. I currently have no partitions and four computers backing up to it. My wife and use it, one iMac and one air book for each of us.

Mine tend to work nearly all the time, but hers do not, especially her iMac. Our computers run a mix of Lion and Snow Leopord, but no correlation between that and successful back ups it seems.

Any thoughts?

Would partitioning the drive into 4 be a good idea? would getting all macs on Lion help?

I have spent a lot of time trying to make sure her iMac correctly mounts the external drive, has appropriate privileges etc, but she usually gets a "backup drive is read only error" and other errors at other times.

Cheers,

 

[r0k]

Hey all,

Here is the deal: I have one external drive (2TB) attached to an airport extreme. I use this drive exclusively for time machine backups. I currently have no partitions and four computers backing up to it. My wife and use it, one iMac and one air book for each of us.

Mine tend to work nearly all the time, but hers do not, especially her iMac. Our computers run a mix of Lion and Snow Leopord, but no correlation between that and successful back ups it seems.

Any thoughts?

Would partitioning the drive into 4 be a good idea? would getting all macs on Lion help?

I have spent a lot of time trying to make sure her iMac correctly mounts the external drive, has appropriate privileges etc, but she usually gets a "backup drive is read only error" and other errors at other times.

Cheers,

TM backup errors to a network drive are commonly caused by wifi issues. My wife's Mac mini (802.11b/g) had a lot of TM errors until I ditched her wifi and moved her to gigabit ethernet. My Macbook with 802.11n, less than 20 feet from the TC it is backing up to never has TM backup problems via wifi.

I suggest you mount the backup so it shows on your desktop as "Time Machine Backups" and check it with disk utility. If it fails or goes into "deep traversal" just write it off. Grit your teeth, delete it and start over. The first backup would be best done via ethernet if possible.

 

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thanks, I will try that.

For all of these, the first back up i did directly by USB and then subsequent over wifi. Could there be a problem there? Would using ethernet for first one work better (thereby keeping the drive in the "same place")?