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.

If you are reading this article, it’s likely because your Macbook Air or other Apple Mac laptop has started freezing up on you, or has slowed to a crawl and is grinding away, or you may even seem to be out of disk space. If any of these are your issue, a good place to start checking is with your Mac’s ‘mobile backups’, which, despite the name, aren’t backups for your mobile devices onto your Mac, but rather are backups that your portable computer (i.e. laptop) makes to itself when you are away from your Time Capsule or other backup drive.

If you have found that your Mac hard drive or Windows hard drive is suddenly nearly out of space (maybe you got the “Your startup disk is almost full” message), and if you have an iPhone that you connect to iTunes, your iPhone backups may be the culprit. Here’s how to find your iPhone backups, and what to do about it.

Oh how we have longed for this day! After we made the switch to the iPhone, after being staunch Android fans for so long, the thing that we missed most about Android was apps like SMS Backup, which automatically forward your text messages to your Gmail account. This means that if you are at your computer, and not by your phone, you still get your text messages. It also means that you can maintain an archive of your text messages, if you like. This function has not existed in any app for the iPhone, and in fact we tried having it developed on our own, and ran into obstacles at every turn (mostly restrictions by Apple). But now, at last, we have our beloved SMS backup to Gmail function back, on our iPhone, and we are very happy campers.

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.