#Mac external hard drive time machine mac os x#
#Mac external hard drive time machine install#

#Mac external hard drive time machine mac os x#

Apple’s discussion of Time Machine as one of Leopard’s features states: “Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices.”īut an Apple online support page, Mac OS X 10.5: Where Can Time Machine Back Up? (dated June 10, 2008), says: In fact, it seems like even Apple isn’t clear. It’s not clear to me whether what I wanted to do – back up to an external drive shared by another Mac running Leopard – was part of Apple’s plan for Time Machine or not. But I never seemed to get around to doing that.Īfter setting the Time Machine drive as shared on the iMac, I could view its contents from the PowerBook, but I couldn’t set it as the target disk for that system’s Time Machine. Oh, I could have unplugged the external drive from the iMac, plugged it into the PowerBook, and run Time Machine or some other backup software, and then reconnected the drive to the iMac.

#Mac external hard drive time machine install#

I was able to use these backups to rescue myself from a self-induced computer crash (see Restoring a Crashed Mac with an Install Disc and Time Machine).īut even though I’ve been using the PowerBook far more often than the iMac lately, I had no backup strategy for it. There’s a 500 GB USB hard drive plugged into the iMac, which has been set for regular Time Machine backups. I’ve got two Macs at home – a 17″ iMac and a 12″ G4 PowerBook notebook.

As well, Apple has released a pair of Time Capsule models – effectively a single device combining an AirPort 802.11n base station with either a 500 GB or 1 TB hard drive.

March 2008 updates (to both Time Machine and AirPort) allowed Leopard users to use Time Machine to backup to USB hard drives connected to one of Apple’s AirPort Extreme base stations. Time Machine is most commonly used to back up to an external USB or FireWire hard drive directly attached to a Mac running Leopard. 2008 – Apple released the Time Machine backup utility as part of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in October 2007.