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How Do I Mount and External Hard Drive To the Desktop Of a Different Computer?

Love the site; love the videos.
I just bought a 3 TB external hard drive for my 27″ iMac that I will use to store movies and do time Machine backups for the iMac. I want my MacBook Pro to be able to access this hard drive as well. Is there a way to have a desktop icon on my MacBook Pro that would link to the external drive on my iMac?
Also, do I need to put a partition on the external hard drive… one partition for my movies and one partition for my time Machine backups?
Thanks again Gary!!
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Kendall

Comments: 4 Responses to “How Do I Mount and External Hard Drive To the Desktop Of a Different Computer?”

    12 years ago

    So you will be partitioning the drive into two parts. The TM part. and the movies part. Yes.
    But I recommend having a complete drive just for TM. TM needs to have a whole drive to itself. You can "fake it" but partitioning your 3TB drive into 2 parts, so TM thinks its partition is a separate drive. But I find that it is not worth it with drives being so cheap today.
    (For one thing, realize that those movies will never be backed up as they are on the same drive as the backup -- one point of failure).
    Yes, you can set an alias to a shared drive, or a folder on that drive. Just go to it like you would normally, and then Option+Command+Drag that folder to create an alias to that folder on your desktop or anywhere.
    You could also drag it to the Finder sidebar or the Dock as that creates an alias automatically.

      Kendall
      12 years ago

      Thanks Gary!
      I took your advice about having a separate device for backups and got a 2 TB Time Capsule. Now my iMac and Macbook Pro are wirelessly backing up to the Time Capsule and my external media drive is being shared across my network.
      Kendall

    Ken Russ
    12 years ago

    I am running TM over my Wi-FI network to my MAC from my wire's Mac. All works fine with one problem. It appears the network traffic is being passed through my network modem and bounced around the internet. I am using a Apple AIRPORT EXTREME. The reason I know this is my network traffic has increased especially the upload data.

    Is there a Airport configuration I might have wrong?

      12 years ago

      It shouldn't be. It should be local. I can't think of anything that would cause it to do that. Perhaps it is a separate issue and not TM backups causing that.

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