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I have two up-to-date Macs - a laptop and an iMac both on the same network. How can I set up the laptop so it automatically use a dedicated external drive of the iMac for its Time Machine backups? All I can find online is how to use another computers hard drive for Time Machine Backups. TIA
MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 15.0
All I can find online is how to use another computers hard drive for Time Machine Backups. TIA
It's the same thing. An external hard drive is just another drive. Use File Sharing to share it out as per this article:
Back up to a shared folder with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support
At step 6., the "folder" is your external drive.
How many USB-C ports do you have between the iMac and laptop. I don't have a iMac but two MBP's and use them for backups. Never really liked using wifi to backup my mac's over the years. Always used cables and now with everything going wifi or bluetooth or airdrop, just more traffic in the air.
The computers are in different rooms. I’m currently backing up to a Synology server over Wi-Fi without any issue. I want a second back up but on a AFP initialized drive to make it easier if I have to recover after a failure. The Synology drives are not AFP.
i have already tried this. These instructions are for a “folder” on a hard drive like another Mac -it would work if you could place a folder on a Time Machine back up drive. My Mac external hard drive has been initialized as a Time Machine backup and does not show up as a “folder” and you cannot add a folder to a Time Machine backup volume. As a result you are dead in the water. I contacted Apple and they actually gave me the same instructions and then when we walked through it following the instructions- we both realized there’s no folder on an initialized Time Machine back up drive you can’t follow the instructions any further because of this.
bob2k2 wrote:
i have already tried this. These instructions are for a “folder” on a hard drive like another Mac -it would work if you could place a folder on a Time Machine back up drive.
Folder, drive, directory, mount point…they're all the same. You can select the whole drive as the "folder."
My Mac external hard drive has been initialized as a Time Machine backup and does not show up as a “folder” and you cannot add a folder to a Time Machine backup volume.
That's a whole different issue. Once you attach a drive to Time Machine, that's all it will be until you remove it from Time Machine and erase it. If you want to use it for network backups along with your Mac backup (directly attached), you will need to add an APFS Volume to the drive after you Erase it. You can then assign one Volume to the directly attached Mac and use the other volume for a network backup.
we both realized there’s no folder on an initialized Time Machine back up drive you can’t follow the instructions any further because of this.
The lack of a folder is not the problem as I explained above.
Time Machine back up to another Mac external drive
