You would set up one partition of 1 TB and the other also as 1 TB. Yes, but you will need to set up two separate partitions on the WD Drive, one for the Big Sur Mac and the other for the Mac running High Sierra.įor example, say the WD Drive has a capacity of 2 TB. But.things would be much easier, with far fewer chances of errors.if you simply used a separate hard drive for each of your Macs.Ĭan I use the WD Passport to back up multiple laptops? So, you might be OK if you don't want to set up two separate partitions on the WD drive. Time Machine backed up to the correct WD 500 GB drive. When I did this, two hard drive icons appeared on the my laptop's desktop.WD 500 GB and Backups of (my wife's name) iMac. When the backup was done, I ejected the drive and connected it back to my laptop.

The iMac backed up to 'Backups of (my wife's name) iMac. As soon as I did this, another hard drive icon named 'Backups of (my wife's name) iMac appear on the Mac desktop along with the original drive named WD 500 GB. Then, I ejected the drive and connected it to my wife's Big Sur iMac and went through the motions of setting up the WD Drive for backups. About 150 GB was backed up in about 2 hours. With no prompting, Time Machine automatically configured the WD Drive in APFS (Case Sensitive) and then backed up the contents of my Mac. I connected the drive to my Big Sur laptop and set it up as a destination for Time Machine backups. OK, I used a 6-7 year old USB WD Passport drive which was formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Set up wd passport for mac