Adding a second backup drive to time machine?

[bpetruzzo]

Currently, I have Time Machine backing up my system, along with one of my external drives. The backups are pushing the limit of the 1TB backup drive to about 800GB. Trouble is, I have roughly 2TB more space that hasn't been used yet but gets used more and more each week.

I'm wondering if there's a way to get Time Machine to backup to multiple drives or am I confined to using a single backup drive? I know that within the obvious Time Machine settings, it's only possible to backup to a single drive or switch between different drives. So I was thinking there might be a trick to formatting two separate drives to look like a single drive. That would theoretically work.

Any ideas?

 

[iBookG4user]

You could try a RAID solution, buy an external hard drive with the capacity for two hard drives and set them up for RAID 0.

 

[bpetruzzo]

Yeah, I was just hoping to avoid purchasing more hardware because I've got several TBs of unused space, just not on the same drive.

 

[ian.maffett]

You couldn't format two separate drives to be the same - even if it did work what I would expect it to do is write the same data to both simultaneously (and no, that won't work either). In other words, there really isn't any way of doing what your looking for without an appliance such as Drobo where you could add additional disks / space to your storage pool on the fly.

 

[4wheels]

os x 10.8.1 fixed this issue w time machine

I just added an additional hard disk, initialized the disk to be 1 partition. Opened time machine and selected add a disk.

kapoof - I now have two disks to back up my os and software.

I desperately need this because I am about to get into some photo editing and I also need to back up my vm's on my mac pro.

Way to go apple.