Time machine on two machines?

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jarledb

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#157291 26-Nov-2014 17:10

Trying to Google this, but not having much luck.

I setup my new iMac this week and used the Time Machine backup to migrate data from the old Macbook Air to the iMac. Everything worked nicely. I am going to keep the Macbook Air as a machine for when I am on the road and probably around the house.

Now both machines seem to be using the same Time Machine sparsebundle (so using the same "disk" for backup). Will this create problems for me? Both machines are more or less identical now (and I am going to setup sync to keep things like folders for work updated across machines). But I am concerned that both machines using the same sparsebundle could create serious problems with the backups.

Any experience or thoughts?

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jarledb

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#1183500 26-Nov-2014 17:17

Ah, the machine was setup with the same machine name and Time Machine seemed to do a backup last night from the new machine. But after changing the name of the machine (the new one) and trying another backup now, Time Machine recognised that it was using the old machines backup and asked if I wanted to take over the backup (after which the backup disk would not be available to the old machine), or create a new.

So now I have two Time machine backups going on each their sparsebundle. Probably the safest way to do it.

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#1192620 10-Dec-2014 09:04

Are they both going to the same disk?

I am pondering this as I have my iMac backing up to a Time Capsule (and my wife's Mac Mini also) and just trying to decide whether to bother backing up my Mac Pro (new) to the same disk when I really do not use it much at home anyway so it would often be apart from the Time Capsule for weeks at a time.

I use Backblaze, which backs it up to servers in the USA whenever it is connected so I may just leave it at that.

jarledb

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#1195345 10-Dec-2014 23:37

Yes, both backups are going to the same disk (or rather, to the same NAS and account on the NAS - but for simplicity, yes.. same disk ;)

Its not a problem that the machine is away from the Time Machine. It will backup whatever has not been backed up since the last backup when you reconnect it to your network.

Having fast access to the backup is a good thing if you ask me. The offsite (cloud) backup is really there only to help out if the NAS (harddrive) should fail together with my machine (hello Murphy), or there is a fire or some other catastrophic event that means I won't have access to either the computers or the backup system.