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Multiple Time Machine backups via 1 hard drive on Asus router
Just an informative post since I have posted here before regarding this issue. I was previously trying to connect an external HDD to my Asus router and use it as a Time Machine backup. What I was doing was trying to partition the disk first into 2 volumes since I was hoping it would allow me to set 2 different backups for 2 different laptops. But nothing I tried could get it working right. Time Machine settings wouldn't accept these as usable disks. But I noticed that the Asus router has a special Time Machine section in the settings. I enabled that, thinking the resulting backup disk would only support one machine. But to my surprise, and I'm not sure how the router is handling this, both laptops can see the shared Time Machine backup volume, and both laptops are sucessfully backing up to it. I did manually tell each one to have a quota of approx half the drive storage space, but so far, no issues. I was skeptical that one might be overwriting the other, but when I do attempt to review Time Machine backups, it does seem to identify with its own (i.e. laptop 1 sees "Laptop 1 backup" in the network, and meanwhile laptop 2 sees "Laptop 2 backup". They do not seem to see each other's. I haven't actually tried a full restore yet. I'm not sure if that would require physically connecting via USB or not. But I'm just impressed that two different machines seem to be sharing the one drive without any input from me (literally all I did was let the router format the drive to HFS+ (MacOS Journaled) and then turn on Time Machine in the router settings. This will likely depend on your own router's capabilities but I was surprised mine seems to manage this. So just wanted to leave this post here in case people come searching for advice. I know I should probably just give a drive to each laptop for safety reasons, but I honestly wasn't sure how that would work given the router settings allow me to choose a single volume as a Time Machine network backup. I just never knew that network backup could be used by multiple different computers. Neat.5
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