GoFlex Net & GoFlex Home

[dadeets]

Sorry to bother people, but I don't get the overall picture, so I find it hard to do the right things getting started.

As I understand it, if I have multiple computers, I need to have a different folder on the 'GoFlex Home' for each computer's time machine.

The different factory-named folders don't seem to relate to different computers, but I read an answer in the archive saying the factory names for folders can't be changed.

I have one of the computers backed up just fine with Time Machine, where it says the name (I guess it is the name, or maybe generic name) is ComputersBackup$-1.  ( I don't know why it is a -1, other than I might have tried to name it twice, and it automatically gave it a -1.) (Now, I don't know if that generic name is a folder name, or a drive name.)

Then, I tried to get the Time Machine installed on the 2nd computer (also a Mac). I picked one of the factory named folders, 'GoFlex Home Personal' I think it was.  I assigned it a different password, and proceeded to set up Time Machine within the Mac System Preferences.  It churned away for quite awhile, but then gave me a FAILED mesage.

I presume I've done something very basic wrong. Hopefully, someone will point me in the right direction. 

[tedz]

Here's the picture,you have a computer or two that run just fine and this backup system that is impossiblre. Would you spend hours learning how to fix a new car without any tools. The whole thing is a waste of time.

[DavyB]

All Time Machine backups live in a tree under the Backups.backupdb folder whether it is on an local drive, a networked drive on another Mac, Time Capsule or other NAS such as GoFlex Home, the next level of folders are the machine names, so these have to be different, e.g. "Davids iMac 27", "Davids Macbook Air" etc.

So there will only be 1 Backups.backupdb folder per physical backup set.

The pain is copying them to larger storage when you have so much backed up on a 500GB drive then a 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, they are an awful pain to copy across your LAN even when its cabled Gigabit Ethernet, (they have to go onto journalled HFS+ formatted partitions only with ownership enabled), so network drives are not good destinations for a copy, I gave up and left each smaller drive as was (a dated archive copy) and eventually reformatted the drive well after the newer Time Machine backups had started deleting old save sets.