Over the holidays, I decided to tackle a problem that’s been on the back-burner for a while: how can my wife and I automatically back up our Macs to a common Time Machine drive? We already have a router I’m happy with (the NETGEAR R6400, which is a couple years old now), so I didn’t want to replace a solid router with Apple’s Time Capsule, especially given that the line seems to have been discontinued. Is there a way to keep a common Time Machine drive on the network?
Up until this point, Kim and I have gotten by with our own Time Machine disks that live on our desks: when we’d remember, we’d plug in the disks and ensure a backup was made. I can’t speak for Kim, but I know my backup history was…spotty, to say the least.
When Kim started her own business in 2017, we upgraded her older MacBook Pro with a new SSD and kept the old drive housed where the rarely-used optical drive used to live. All told, she has just shy of a terabyte of storage on her machine, but was (just barely) backing up to a 500GB Time Machine disk. Wanting to ensure that client files and portfolio pieces alike were backed up securely, Kim asked if I could set something up to make the process easier; this is what I found.
