Can I use 1 hard drive and timeshift for 2 pcs?

WeebLife@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 25 points –

I have 2 Linux pcs, wondering if I can have my time shifts backed up to 1 hard drive or if I need to have seperate drives for each PC.

EDIT: I was able to make a partition and use 1 hard drive to back up 2 different pcs. Thanks!

7

Just read up on Timeshift and that should be do able. I would just point them to diff folder names the host name. If your doing BTRFS snapshots it’s a little harder but still do able. You can look at the native send-receive support in BTRFS. I have never used it myself but it worked really will with ZFS

A partition for each one the drive should work alright, but it may turn to custard if they both try to access the drive at the same time.

It won't be an issue for both PCs to access it. I'll try making another partition. Thanks!

It's not so much both computers being able to access it.

From what I have experienced Timeshift tends to lock a drive when it is doing a backup.

If computer 1 is doing a backup and computer 2 tries to start it's backup it may fail without you noticing.

Giving each computer their own partition on the drive should alleviate the problem.

OK, thanks for the clarification. I wasn't planning on having them using the drive at the same time so I shouldn't have any issues.

Not sure whether timeshift supports multiple systems per partition, but I'd be very surprised if you couldn't create separate partitions for each PC