Can I daisy chain macs to act as time machines?

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Can I daisy chain macs to act as time machines?

Say I have a lab of macs numbered between 1 - 16. All of these macs are connected via a switch so they can all see each other.

What I am thinking is to partition the HDD on every mac so that there are 2 partitions each. One of the partitions will be for the OS and the local files and the other will be for the back up of another mac. Doing it this way I was hoping to daisy chain them

Mac ID#	Partition 1	Partition 2
1	Local 1	16's Local
2	Local 2	1's Local
3	Local 3	2's Local
4	Local 4	3's Local
5	Local 5	4's Local
6	Local 6	5's Local
...	...	...
16	Local 16	15's Local

I was thinking of making the 2nd partition of each mac as a time machine target and having it sync the files nightly.

The reason for this is due to the amount of data generated on each mac that getting a dedicated backup server would be too expensive (I would need ~7 TB) for my budget ($0).

Is this possible? Is there a better way?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Dec 18, 2013 8:18 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 18, 2013 8:27 AM in response to digitalprods

I know your budget is $0, But I am of the opinion that it would be much more cost effective to purchase 3 two terabyte ExternalUSB Backup drives and they could all be connected via a USB Hub. There are several ways you can do it this is just one way and mine is at a cost of just over $300.00 and I know you have 0 budgit. This way you are not wasting all of the processing power of the mac.s not in use for nothing more than storage.

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Answer 2

Dec 18, 2013 8:35 AM in response to digitalprods

I don't know, I presume you would share the 2nd partition so the other Mac could see it. Unless someone knows a definite answer then you can only try it and see what happens.

One problem I see is not the Macs but the switch, inexpensive switches generally don't have an ASIC per port, this would reduce the bandwidth the switch could handle at any one time. The more expensive switches I used to work with had one ASIC per 2 ports or one on each port but they were expensive, probably the same price as a backup system you cannot afford.

Hope someone as a definitive answer for you.

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