Has anyone had success recently with running their time machine drive on a separate Mac? I had tried this 3 or so years ago and gave up on it because it kept making me rebuild the backup. I like having my office void of spinning hard drives as I don’t like the sound.
I have a Mac in a closet that I would love to have all HDDs attached to.
I’m wondering if anyone has advice on making this a successful venture when my new Studio arrives.
I’m connected via 10 GbE. So the speed of the drive should be the limit.
I run Time Machine over wifi to a hardwired Synology. No issues except I’m running out of space and older backups are getting pruned.
I experienced some issues with a remote TM backup on my Synology DiskStation. Seemed to be a common problem - had to rebuild the backup from scratch and lost the history. Happened several times on my own MacBook, one time on my wife‘s Mac Mini. Didn‘t occur again for a year or so by now, but I do not fully trust the solution any more.
On the other hand, the setup you‘re proposing - HD attached to a Mac which shares the TM volume - is doing its job for me for about two years now without those problems.
I use TimeMachine on three Macs to backup to both a networked (wire and WiFi) Synology NAS, and (belt and braces) to USB connected drives on each device. All working well for many years. I know this as I do test restores on each about once a quarter