Using an apple 'desktop' as network backup

[casts_by_fly]

Hi gents,

My wife and I have a pair of macbooks. I have been thinking to buy an older mac desktop machine (either mac mini or tower unit) and hook it up to our network as a regular storage backup. I have a 500 GB hard drive in my laptop, but i was thinking to put 1 TB in the desktop and then use the mac's auto backup abilities to that drive. Anyone done this? What spec of desktop would I need to do this successfully? I'm fine if the desktop has Tiger or leopard (my wife's macbook has tiger) as all it will be doing is holding files.

Thanks,
Rick

 

[neil_g]

bit of a waste of a machine, electricity etc

thought about a NAS?

 

[bolide]

If by "the mac's auto backup abilities" you mean Time Machine, then Time Machine doesn't support backups to a network drive. It is possible to make it work but it's an unsupported configuration

Apple servers support network TM backups. Lion server is now only £30 so you could install Lion, upgrade to Lion Server, dedicate a drive to TM backups and backup your machines via the network to that drive. Or you could use a Time Capsule as a network storage / backup device

A simpler way would be to use Carbon Copy Cloner with an external hard drive to backup just your work files

If you want to pursue network backup I wouldn't try to do it via WiFi

Nick Froome