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External hard drives, back ups and more

C

cynics

macrumors G4
Original poster
Jan 8, 2012
11,959
2,154
My iTunes library is quickly expanding passed the point of my 1 tb internal hard drive. This poses two problems, the obvious is not being able to expand it any further. The other is if I have a hard drive failure I'm going to be....well very upset to say the least.

So what I want to do is move my iTunes library to an external drive, maybe 3 tb? AND I want a backup on another drive so maybe another 3 tb hard drive.

What is the best and most reliable way to do this? Speed isn't anything too important since its just media.

I have an iMac and an Airport Extreme. I was thinking about getting two 3 tb WD external hard drives and connecting one to the Mac and the other to the AE for back ups. Then occasionally manually backing up my library to the hard drive connected to the AE.

Is this a good way of doing things? Are WD external drives reliable? Are there better options? I have NO experience with time machine however I have nothing I want to back up on the Mac aside from the iTunes library and a couple documents that I can easily manually manage. And to be honest sometimes Apples way of doing things is frightening to me especially when they start renaming things and using proprietary formats (remember like I said I have no experience with TM) so doing things manually is fine unless there is a better way.

Thanks in advance guys!
 
MCAsan

MCAsan

macrumors 601
Jul 9, 2012
4,587
442
Atlanta
On my rMBP, even with a 1TB SSD, internal storage of major libraries of music, videos, photos, and documents just ain't gonna happen. And that is OK as I do not need to carry all that data around. So I have a LaCie 2Big 6TB RAID 0 drive set where I have folders for music, photos, videos, documents...etc. That frees up my SSD for capturing new photos on field trips. Once culled and edited the new images are move to the external drive set.

Separate to the library RAID 0 set is a LaCie d2 drive that is 6TB. I have Time Machine using it for backups of my internal SSD and the external LaCie drive set.
If I want additional data security then additional data copes would need to be copied to a cloud service and/or drives rotated off site such as to a bank vault.
 
C

ColdCase

macrumors 68040
Feb 10, 2008
3,359
276
NH
The WD 3TB Elements External Desktop Hard Disk Drive is a nice reliable USB3 drive that plays well with Macs and AP Extremes. Its currently less than $90 at B&H and others. The 4TB is less than $100.

Thunderbolt would provide much better performance and reliability, especially if you are doing any editing, but at a price. For backups and a iTunes library USB is OK.

I've used time machine for years without issue. I've also used Carbon Copy Cloner for years. CCC just copies files automatically (on the schedule you set) and the backup disk file structure looks exactly like your main disk. It will only copy files that changed. You can do something similar manually if you want.

I'm a belt and suspenders type of guy, so I like two backups. One thing you can do with TM is to backup to two different drives. With CCC your backup disk can be bootable. So (for the family machines) I do both, at a cost of an extra drive. Dunno if another $100 is worth that to you. For my workhorse rMBP and mini server I use TB enclosures with both TM and CCC.
 
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