Here’s how to make a Mac back up to a specific drive when you use more than one drive with Time Machine. Plus what “Back Up with Consistency Scan” means.

Want to back one Mac up to another? Or backup a Macbook up to an iMac? Or a Mac desktop? Whether you have a Macbook Air, a Macbook Pro, a Mac Mini or an iMac, here’s how to make Time Machine back up one Mac to second Mac, instead of a Time capsule or other external drive, and how to get Time Machine to recognize the target Mac or Macbook as a valid backup disk.

Here at TIP we are a broadly Mac shop, and we do love our Apple computers. But that doesn’t mean that they never fail, and recently we learned the hard way that there are some known issues with certain repairs – Mac gotchas, if you will – that will get you every time. Such is the case with having your logic board replaced, which will cause problems for you with Time Machine and iTunes, because it changes your computer’s MAC address, on which Time Machine and iTunes rely to authenticate your computer. The biggest issue we see is that Apple knows about this, and doesn’t warn the customer before swapping out the logic board. A simple warning from Apple before replacing a logic board could save Apple customers hours – days even – of stress, heartache, and futile searching and effort; but Apple doesn’t give their customers that warning. So, we are giving you that warning – here’s our word to the wise.

You may have noticed that there was no new article on The Internet Patrol yesterday.

That’s because my hard drive crashed, which meant that a) I had no way to write and post an article, and b) I spent all day dealing with a dead computer. Long-time readers will remember that the same thing happened to me last year, and may wonder if I’d learned my lesson. You bet I did. And now I’m going to talk to you about why you need a redundant backup system, with a portable backup device as well as an online backup solution.