Should I Shut down the iMac when not in use

[Apple_Robert]

Unless you are experiencing bad weather or will be gone for an extended amount of time, I see no reason to shut down the Mac every day. Turning off every day will put more stress on the Mac than leaving it running.

Aren't all of you thankful that banks, retailers, and the rest of the world at large doesn't turn off everything at night? And yet, many of you feel it is important and good for the Mac to be shut down every night, for some mysterious reason.

 

[antonypg]

I have an iMac 2017 5K which has been running 24/7 since I bought it. I use it as my main machine for work/gaming, plus it acts as a file server for my music/video library. It also works as a Time Machine for all of the Mac laptops in the household.

I tried running a NAS instead but decided that a Mac makes the best server for a group of Macs,

 

[lawlietkm]

I have an iMac 2017 5K which has been running 24/7 since I bought it. I use it as my main machine for work/gaming, plus it acts as a file server for my music/video library. It also works as a Time Machine for all of the Mac laptops in the household.

I tried running a NAS instead but decided that a Mac makes the best server for a group of Macs,

how are you doing this, using your mac as a NAS?

 

[glenthompson]

how are you doing this, using your mac as a NAS?

Go into System Preferences->Sharing and share the drives you want. Been part of MacOS for many years. I have two 4tb drives in a JBOD enclosure that I share.

 

[The_Croupier]

I like using energy saver/scheduler to shut down and restart automatically.

 

[antonypg]

how are you doing this, using your mac as a NAS?

I just use large external USB drives. I have an external drive containing Music/TV/Films, I share this using media sharing. I have another drive I use for software and generally backup, this is shared using normal file sharing. I have another drive I use for remote Time Machine for my other Macs. Then I have an 8TB drive which I use as a Time Machine drive for backup of the internal drive and the media/software drives. I have a few smaller drives which I use for off site backup, I use Chronosync to backup the data onto these.