Using a Lacie external drive for back ups (of Dropbox and other information) and storage of old info

Trish2402 wrote:

I'm looking to purchase a Mac Studio and want to connect 2 Mac Book Airs (2020 and 2022 models) and a Mac Studio to a LaCie d2 Professional, 10TB, External Hard Drive Desktop, Thunderbolt 3 USB-C, https://www.lacie.com/gb/en/products/d2/1.

First of all, that is not a Thunderbolt device. It is strictly USB.

Back up Dropbox using Time Machine that will be set up on the Lacie hard drive. I've read in another thread that Dropbox and Time Machine shouldn't be backed up directly. But I'm not sure how to follow the advice given by one of the community listed below....

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"So follow their (Dropbox) advice and exclude the Dropbox directory from Time Machine as well as setting up a script or something that automatically copies the data from the Dropbox folder into another folder and then allowing Time Machine to backup that folder. "

No one else can speak to someone else's advice. I found that thread: Dropbox files and Time machine - Apple Community, but I have no idea what they are talking about. I can find confirmation of that advice on the Dropbox forums.

If you have to choose between DropBox and Time Machine, the choice is clear - keep Time Machine and drop Dropbox.

2.Back up the Mac Book Airs using the Lacie hard drive

Do I have to plug the Mac book airs into the Lacie hard drive or can this be done using file sharing? If yes, is this a reliable way to back up and easy to set up?

It depends. You can plug multiple computers into a Time Machine backup disk and it will work just fine. It's just inconvenient to do all that plugging and unplugging, especially with an externally powered drive.

You can share the drive over the network, but then that works best if you have a stable machine to use as a server, with UPS backup of both the server and the drive. Network backups are more flaky than directly connected backups, but it does work.

3.Use the Lacie hard drive to store information from my old iMac (that will be replaced by the Mac Studio) as well as storing new stuff that I'll be putting onto the Mac Studio.

Don't do that. You should dedicate the entire disk to backups. Don't put non-Time Machine data on it. In the past, with the old HFS+ Time Machine, you could partition the drive and use one partition as Time Machine and another one for other storage. I don't even know if that is possible with modern APFS backups. I do know that it is a bad idea. Inevitably, you get stuck with one or both of the partitions being too small. But since you share the disk, you now can't repartition it safely.

Trish2402 wrote:

So the answer is:

Use two external hard drives:

One to store information from the old IMac

2. One to put the DropBox files on using Lacie's back up system?

and save everything from all three computers onto Dropbox.

and don't set up TimeMachine on the computers at all.....

That's definitely not my answer. All Mac users should have at least one Time Machine backup. End of story.

If you to have another hard drive for storing additional files, go for it. You can run DropBox too if you want. But if DropBox officially recommends that Time Machine should not be used with DropBox, then there is only one answer - uninstall DropBox.