Hi Gary, I love your highly informative videos.
I have a 2024 MacBook Air (S15.2), an iPad Pro)2024-18-2), and an iPhone 15(18.2).
I am planning to buy the new Mac Mini. I enjoyed your video about using external hard drives instead of external SSDs (which I use now).
My questions are as follows:
1- If I buy an external HD, can I back up my Mac, iPad, and Mac Mini using the single external HD?
2- Can it be partitioned to do this?
3- Any other suggestions?
Thanks, and a very Happy New Year to you and your family,
All the best from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Greg
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GregJ
Time Machine backups are only for Macs. So you wouldn't back up your iPad to a drive like that. Store your iPad's files in the Files app under iCloud Drive and they would all be on your Macs anyway. Use the iCloud Backup setting in the Settings app for your app data, which would normally just be small amounts of app data and such.
As for your Macs, yes you can use the same hard drive to back up both Macs. Don't partition. Time Machine just handles it. Just connect to each one in turn and select the drive as your backup. But then you have to deal with moving the drive between machines all the time. Easy to forget and let one machine get way behind.
So why not do one of these instead:
A separate drive for each Mac. The mini is stationary, so why not let it have its own drive always attached. Use a second drive for the MacBook. So the mini is always backed up, and your MacBook is the only one you need to remember to plug in daily.
Or, consider that you may not need to back up both. Are all of your files on iCloud Drive? If so, they are on both Macs.
The way I do it is I have a Mac Studio with a big drive and iCloud Drive set to NOT "optimize." Then my MacBook Air is used with only iCloud Drive files, nothing local-only. So any file I work with on my MacBook Air would also be on my Mac Studio. So I just backup the Mac Studio.
I can drop my MacBook Air into a lake, get a new one, sign into iCloud Drive and I'm all set. In fact I kinda do that when I get a new MacBook every 3-4 years or so. I just put the old one in a drawer, sign into iCloud on the new one, and continue like normal since all the files are in iCloud Drive.