Two macs being backed up to one airport disk

[Abdulhaq]

I have one 2011 mac-mini and one 2010 macbook connected via airport extreme to an external hard disk. The mac-mini (running yosemite) is connected via ethernet and the macbook (running mountain lion) is connected wirelessly. They are both set to automatically make backups using time machine on the same external hard disk. I would like to know whether my backups will be corrupted if the time machine backup starts on both the machines almost at the same time.

 

[JTToft]

I would like to know whether my backups will be corrupted if the time machine backup starts on both the machines almost at the same time.

- They won't. Time Machine is designed to back up several machines to one destination. The backups are kept separate on the drive, if I recall correctly.

If you connect a USB hard disk to your AirPort Extreme, you can use the Time Machine application to back up all your Mac computers, including your photos, music, movies, and documents.

Page 13, here: https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1644/en_US/airport_extreme_80211ac_setup.pdf

Caveat: I have no personal experience with multiple backups. I am going by Apple's documentation alone.

 

[ColdCase]

No corruption. If you look at the destination drive in the finder you should see sparse bundles for each machine. Those act like separate independent drives. When a machine starts to backup it mounts the sparse image as a drive and writes to it. There could be other reasons the backups get corrupted, like a failing drive, but not multiple backups.

I've had 5 laptops backing up to the same drive for years without issues.

 

[Abdulhaq]

Thank you for your help

Thanks to all of you for your very helpful and informative feedback.