Two Macs One Hard Drive??

kiemposan

Registered
My cheapskate company wants to explore the idea of using one external Hard drive as back up for two mac G5's! So im here to find out if this can be done, as the G5's are close together it would be ideal for them to both be connected to the backup drive, can this be done? does it need to be partitioned? Just need some thoughts on how this could be achieved. Hopefully it will be too much hassle and the Boss will be forced to buy two.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
I think you would need a dedicated server to manage it. Or you could have one of the G5s act as the server, assuming it will be on all the time and can suffer the performance hit.

Using a server for backups is really a good idea when you have lots of clients, but if you only have TWO client machines, it'll probably be much more expensive than just giving each their own disk.

Although one must wonder how useful a backup is if it's in the same box (or even the same room) as the original....
 
Thanks, we have tried backing up to our server which the bosses assured us was big enough, but strangely it seems to be full most of the time and is generally unreliable. I agree with what you say at the end, and we archive our work and have that stored away, what we need is a daily back up solution, the guy who bought are new G5s didn't really take this into consideration when making the purchase, and now we're trying to pursuade the powers that be to give us more money - they like making it , not spending it. A

ny more advice would be great, thanks chaps
 
To do this you would defintely need two disks, although drives have two ports on the back it is usally so they can be chained with other devices. I have just tried on ione of my systems and I can have two drives on one Mac, but not one drive on 2 macs.

I have to agree with Mikuro about the back up being in the same room as the system it is backing up. This will only help in the case of the original being corrupted and then only if the problem is spotted before the next full back up is run. You don't mention what you are backing up, how much that is, how often you are doing it or what saftware you are using to do it ? All this will help to get a more detailed answer

Correct me if I'm wrong though, but I would have to say that if your company are quibbling about the cost of a couple of external drives they cannot place a very high value on the data you are trying to secure...
 
If you have one external hard drive, yes having two partitions would fix the problem. One for each system. Backing up shouldn't take to long as long as you are connecting to the drives via firewire. The backup process shouldn't be to hard either, I would suggest using Carbon Copy Cloner.

Of course if the drive is very large and the G5s don't have a lot on them, I would suggest doing four partitions, the first two being exact images of everything on the G5s so that you could restore them to their original state if needed, and the second two for user account data that should be backed up regularly.

I only recommend a server option if we are talking about very small amounts of data to be backed up (otherwise it takes to much time via ethernet). So as long as you aren't doing anything like graphic design or audio/video production the server idea would be an option.
 
Back
Top