Use mini to backup Air

No. Get an external drive to use for backups.

 

External is best, but what you could do is use CrashPlan because it allows you to backup to any other computer on your home network (or even a remote network) for free, then have a time machine or carbon copy cloner drive setup on your mini.

This is more or less how I handle my setup.

 

This is also my setup, and what I was planning on suggesting before I clicked into the thread.

 

Yes. I do this.

My mini has a number of external drives connected, one of which houses TM backups for my 3 machines. On my external TM drive I have created 3 partitions (Mac OX Extended (Journaled) & GUID Partition Table). It's a good idea to partition a drive if it’s being used by more than one client as Time machine (given the right circumstances*) can eat space so partitions allow you to control the storage allocation.

Once your target disk is in order all you need to do is share the drive in sharing preferences, mount the drive on the client computer and configure TM on the client.

Thanks

Tom

*FYI: In my setup my mini does a lot of ripping/archiving/encoding/downloading etc - so it's constantly creating, re-encoding, moving and deleting large files. These files eventually get stored on another external disk where backup is handled by Carbon Copy Cloner (archiving to a NAS). Unfortunately my ripping/re-encoding workflow does mean that a lot of data passes through the mini although the basic configuration remains unchanged. As I don't need TM to keep a history of these files the minis TM partition is fairly modest (Eventually I'll move my ripping workflow into a folder that isn't monitored by TM). If I left all of my machines archiving to a single partition the mini's TM archives would quickly monopolise the disk space leaving little room for the MBA where I have a greater need for historical backups (photography workflow).

Check here for more info

 

No, you're not doing what the OP asked. You're backing up to an external drive, which is what was suggested in the first two responses. You're not backing up the MBA onto the Mac mini, but rather onto an external drive.

 

So partition the mac mini drive and he should be able to TM on that partition ?

 

No. You can't have the Mac mini and another computer both trying to control the mini's internal drive. You have to use an external drive for backups.