External Hard Drives?

[Maooose]

I have a quick question. I have a Mac desktop and laptop. Both contain pictures and neither of them are backed up in anyway. I know scary! So, I want to get an external hard drive to back up pictures on but was wondering if I can use one drive for both of my computers? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Quintin]

It's something I've often wondered before, as well. I was on PC until a couple of months ago, and when I was planning to get my MacBook Pro, I thought I'd be between the two computers for a while still. But now that I have my MacBook Pro, I don't do any work on the PC anymore... at all. I keep half of my external formatted with NTFS, but it's something of a waste of space and I want to extend the Mac partition at some point.

I think it might be possible if you keep it plugged into each with a different connector — say, eSATA for the PC and Firewire for the Mac — and if you keep two partitions on the hard drive (one for PC, on for Mac), and only run one at a time. I have no idea how safe this idea is, so you should do some more research on that side first.

Edit:

Sorry, when you say you have a laptop, do you mean you have a PC laptop or a MacBook?

[Nicole]

Yep, it's possible to have a HD formatted for both Mac and PC. You can either do 2 partitions (which I've done) or format it in FAT32 so you can read and write on both Mac and PC (also done this).

More here.

[Maooose]

I have an iMac desktop and a MacBook Pro. Both are Macs. I would like to have my pictures from both backed up in one place if possible.

[Nicole]

Oh, that can be easy enough. I'm toying with various solutions for that right now including using a drive on the network for backups of the images to be done on download and walking a small external HD back and forth between computers with my Lightroom library on it.

[OsmosisStudios]

Depends on what you want to backup onto the drive. If you want to use Apple's TIme Machine system, then I would suggest a separate drive for each machine. If youre just backing up files, as long as you keep it organized, youre okay.

[Maooose]

I wouldn't be using Apple Time Machine system. So, it would just be files/photos from each.

[Jim Poor]

Use one drive and plug /unplug to-from each machine as you want to do a backup.

-or-

Usa a network attached drive so that you can leave both machines attached to the drive via the netowork full time.

-or-

Attach the drive to one machine and use all the wonderful sharing tools of OS X to transfer the files of the other machine to the drive, via the "main" machine.


Now, for a completely different train of thought.

Having two separate machines is a recipe for trouble if they each have their own set of "originals."
I have one machine that is dedicated to photography and it has all the originals on it. When I travel, I use another machine, but bring it home and transfer everything to the main workstation right away.

I use desktop sharing and such if I want to work from another room on my laptop, but all the original files are on only one machine so there is only one to back up.