Set Up Airport to back up multiple computers in small office

We need to get some clarification please, in order to provide the correct answers.

I am setting up a new Airport Extreme

An AirPort Extreme is a router only. You would need to connect a USB hard drive to the USB port on the AirPort Extreme if you want to back up to the drive attached to the AirPort Extreme.

If you really meant to say that you have an AirPort Time Capsule.....that device is actually an AirPort Extreme with a built-in hard drive that could be used for backup purposes.

Which device are you asking about here.....an AirPort Extreme....or....an AirPort Time Capsule?

I want 4-5 computers in a small office to each have separate backups no the device

All of these computers will need to be Macs if you want each of them to back up correctly using Apple's Time Machine backup application. Is that the case?

An additional comment......while your plan might be OK for a very small office.....the AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule were designed primarily for light home use.....not business use. So, it would be a good idea to have an additional backup plan for each computer. In other words, you would not want to rely on a single back up solution if the data on the Macs that will be backed up is valuable to you.

For example.....say you were using a Time Capsule to back up each of the Macs in the office. If the Time Capsule has a serious problem, you will likely lose all of the backups of all of the Macs in the office.

In this regard, the fastest and most reliable type of backup would be to have a hard drive connected directly to each of the Macs in the office.....so you could have a dual back up system. Macs would back up automatically to a Time Capsule for example, and also to the hard drive that is connected directly to the Mac.

The bottom line here to having a solid backup plan........ask yourself what would happen if the drive that you are using for backups at the present time failed. Because It will....you just don't know when.

No need to set up separate user accounts.

If you simply set up Time Machine to back up to the AirPort Time Capsule from each Mac.......the backups of each Mac will automatically be kept separate from the others. Users will only be able to see the backups that they have made on the Mac that they are using.

If you are the administrator, you will be able to access any of the backups of any of the Macs.

AS Bob mentioned it simply requires setting it up via each machine. I connect 2 MBP's and an iMac to my time capsule and it works very well.

You are already the administrator if you set up the Time Capsule.

If you need to see the backups of another Mac, the simplest thing to do by far is go to that Mac and use that Mac to view the backups.

It's possible.....but quite complicated.....to see the backups of other other Macs from your Mac. I would not do this unless there were no other options.

See the pink box in this support article: http://pondini.org/TM/17.html