How-to: Partition hard drive and back-up two Mac's using Apple's

Got two Macintosh Computers? One external hard drive? The desire to seamlessly backup all of your information using Apple’s Time Machine application? Keep READING!…

Apple’s “Time Machine” is a highly effective and user-friendly back-up program that allows you to not only easily back up your hard drive but allows you to go back to EXACT instances and recover files. From Apple.com:

“Time Machine is the breakthrough automatic backup that’s built right into Mac OS X. It keeps an up-to-date copy of everything on your Mac — digital photos, music, movies, TV shows, and documents. Now, if you ever have the need, you can easily go back in time to recover anything.”

Objective: Divide (Partition) an external hard drive to be used for TWO separate Apple computer’s utilizing Mac’s Time Machine Backup feature.

What you need:

• An External Hard drive big enough to support both (or all) of your existing hard drives. In my case both of my machines have 250 GB Hard drives so I opted to buy a 500 GB Western Digital ‘My Book’.
• Mac OS X 10.5.2 or Higher
• Two or more Apples/Mac Computers

Getting Started ….

One thing that I ALWAYS do before I backup my data is to go back through all of my files and make sure that everything is in order, in tact and looks nice and tidy. Although this is not necessary I do recommend it.
Plug in your external hard drive.
Open up your DISK UTILITY. If you dont know where this is you should (spotlight it).

Now click on the Partition Tab (Shown below)

In the left column select the Disk/Hard drive you are going to split. With the hard drive selected click the drop-down menu that says Volume Scheme. Select how many different partitions you wish to create. For me two was plenty. I suggest only dividing the hard drive into as many partitions as you actually need. More is not better in this case. Once you’ve designated a volume scheme, click on the individual partitions which will be displayed in the middle column. Give each partition a name (not shown below). Select a desired Format for each partition. Select Mac OS Extended (non-journaled). Now click Apply and your hard-drive will be partitioned.

Partition Interface in Disk Utility:

Any and ALL data saved on your hard drive will be deleted when you partition it!

Make sure you save this data elsewhere if you wish to keep it.
Now open up Time Machine. Click Change Disk…. Select the corresponding partition that you just created. Click OK and time machine will begin backing up your data. This will take some time depending on how much information you have stored on your hard drive.

Time Machine working:

Now you can Eject the hard drive. On your second machine, open up Time Machine and select the OTHER partition that you created and click okay.

Please feel free to leave comments, feedback, questions, etc.