Lets say I have 3 drives used. Bay 1 is for OS/Apps, Bay 2 for VM's (Fusion), Bay 3 is just for data (music, photos, movies, iwork docs...) Lets say I have a big enough Time Machine Drive to back up everything all drives. One day The drive in Bay 1 dies, which holds the OS/Apps. I replace with a new drive, and select from Restore from Time Machine. Is Time machine smart enough to just restore all data from HD Bay 1? Nothing happened to the other drives.
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Mac Pro Time Machine question
- Thread starter bestthereis27
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Yes it can. Why not just create a raid0? I use vm heavily and it's a great setup. Time machine and clone backs are simple and it's fast.
Well for one thing, RAID0 is not a redundancy configuration. RAID0 is striping two drives together to make them appear as a single volume combining the space on both drives. Perhaps you're thinking of RAID1 which is a mirrored configuration.
However, RAID1 is not a backup solution. It's just a way to minimize downtime in the event of a drive failure. It's not providing you with actual backups of your data in the sense that Time Machine does.
If you accidentally delete or mangle a file on RAID1 mirror you have no backup of that file. There's no way to restore the deleted or damaged file from an older copy. This capability is crucial to any backup solution.
Well Techinally...The plan is to have OS in Bay 1 on a SSD, Bay 2 & 3 with Velicoraptors in a Raid 1 for VM's, and a 2TB in Bay 4 for Data. I can not afford to have my VM's go down. I understand if the SSD craps out then i'm screwed, but I'm pretty sure SSD's have better life than mechanical drives. My goal is to keep the VM's on separate drive than the OS...But if I had to I could just put the OS and VM's on the same Raid 1 array then not have to worry. And still have a TM backup.
I didn't see anywhere in the original post regarding redundancy. The point is that raid0 provides speed which is very useful when running VMs. With timemachine and nightly clones, backups are up to date. You can boot the clone, get any needed data from time machine and rebuild the raid0 pretty quickly, if needed. This is a very rare thing on a workstation.
The ssd and vastly different drive sizes are a good reason to not use raid0. I prefer mechanical drives myself.
I think Time Machine is smart enough to restore the specific drive itself.
Also is there a reason you need the Velociraptors? In my experience a pair of Western Digital Black series drives perform just as good if not better.
Also is there a reason you need the Velociraptors? In my experience a pair of Western Digital Black series drives perform just as good if not better.