best external hard drive time machine over network

Since this technique requires multiple Macs, it’s particularly well-suited to places such as offices and schools, but it can also come in handy if you have an old Mac laying around, that you want to repurpose as your own personal Time Machine repository. In this article, I’m going to show how to turn your Mac into a centralised backup for one, or even multiple Macs on the same network. This is much easier than having to invest time and effort into setting up macOS Server, plus it doesn’t require you to download any additional software! If you have access to two Macs that are running High Sierra, then you can create a shared folder on the host Mac, and then setup the “client” Mac to automatically backup its data to this shared folder.

In previous releases of macOS, you could setup macOS Server on a “host” Mac and then share a mounted hard drive as a Time Machine disk over the network – but in High Sierra this functionality is now built-in.

But if something does go wrong with your Mac and you wind up losing days, weeks, or even months worth of data, then you’re going to regret falling behind on your Time Machine backups! How many times have you forgot to plug the external hard drive into your Mac, only for your scheduled Time Machine backup to fail as a result?Ĭreating a backup is one of those annoying tasks that’s easy to keep putting off, especially if you need to attach an external hard drive to your Mac every single time you create a backup.

Best external hard drive time machine over network