Backing Up a Small Network

To this point, I've assumed that you're backing up a single Mac. But what if you have several in your home or office? How does this affect your backup strategy?

One approach is to back up each Mac separately. This may involve keeping separate stacks of recordable CDs or DVDs next to each Mac, hooking up FireWire drives to each one, or moving a single high-capacity drive from one computer to the next. If your backup needs are relatively small, there's nothing wrong with this approach. But if you have more than a couple of machines—especially if their hard disks contain a lot of data that you can't afford to lose—a wiser strategy would be to back them all up at the same time over your network.

Note

You do have a network, ...

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