Is there a way to connect two computers to one firewire drive?

P

PD

Registered
Ok, this might be a silly question but who cares... My girlfriend and I have a small network with a dsl modem, router, two computers and a printer. We just bought a firewire drive for backup purposes. What are our options for backup?

We have retrospect desktop which works perfectly but is there a way to connect both our macs, via firewire, to the hard drive? Or do we have to do this over the network and if so, how do we do it? Any other tips and solutions besides constantly swapping the drive from her computer to mine?

Thanks!

PD
 
Do you leave your computers on all the time? The reason I ask this is because you can simply hook the firewire drive to one computer and share it over AppleTalk for the other computer to use. The drive would be physically connected to one computer, but BOTH computers would have access to it -- and, if one of you isn't home or whatever, if your computer is on, then the other computer could still connect to yours and use the firewire drive connected to that computer.

The way you would do this is to enable AppleTalk in your Network preferences, hook the drive up to one computer, and "share" that drive. Then, the other computer can use the "Connect to Server" command from the Finder, connect to the other computer, mount the shared firewire drive, and use it that way.

Let us know if you need more specific instructions than that -- I don't know your level of expertise, so if you need more explicit instructions, we'll be happy to provide them. I think this is the easiest way to share that drive.
 
That works really well! Thanks! I didn't realize it would work that easily. We're set now - much easier than moving the drive back and forth javascript:smilie(':)')

Thanks again! I appreciate your quick reply.

PD
 
sadly, a shared firewire 400 drive that worked under jaguar no longer shares under panther. and i'm not sure what i need to reset to make it work. i turned appletalk on for all 3 imacs that used to see the drive, but that didn't help
 
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