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Sossity

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 12, 2010
1,360
32
I have 2; 2 terabyte western digital hard drives that I use to store all my music content on, including an itunes library.

I have albums ripped in flac, & in mp3. I also scan my album art & have separate folders for these scans.

my hard drives are labeled; MUSIC 2TB-A, & the backup is MUSIC 2TB-B.

I have been using disc utility on my mac to do the backup. In the restore tab, i drag the music drive A into the source space, & the music drive B into the target space.

I choose erase destination & replace with contents of A, except for what is only on B or something like this.

I have been going through scanning & ripping all my audio Cd's, & updating/browsing my drive A & I am finding that albums that I ripped & remember scanning album art, is missing, I either find the ripped album, & missing the scan, or I have the scans but am missing the album. It is odd because before I did my last backup of drive A to B, I remember seeing the missing items that were on drive A. And after that backup, they are gone.

Either way, it is getting a bit tedious in that I am gong back & redoing things, & I do distinctly remember scanning or ripping the albums, where things are missing.

I am also or try to be careful about what I delete.

Is there something or setting that I am not getting? maybe i need to do a complete format & erase of the B music drive each time before I back it up/copy with music drive A contents to start fresh?

so far, I just did the format of drive B the 1st time I connected it to disk utility, & all the subsequent backups I have done to it (for each time I add more to the A drive) I have used the restore function to copy. I have not done an erase or format 1st before I connect & restore/copy drive A onto drive B.

Is there a fairly simple way I can do a backup between hard drives on either a mac or PC, & be sure that drive B is exactly like drive A, so I do not go back browsing drive A to find things missing?
 
Why so complicated? Have you looked into CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper! yet to backup one HDD to the other?

I have one 500 GB HDD for my photographs (digital and analog) libraries and editing documents, one 500 GB HDD with my personal video footage in an editing friendly format.
Both 500 GB HDDs get backed up to one 1 TB HDD via CarbonCopyCloner.
And that 1 TB HDD gets backed up to another 1 TB HDD via CarbonCopyCloner.
Therefore I have three copies of my important data.
 
THanks for the suggestions, perhaps I will try one of these, I asked someone, a digital specialist, & they said that these types of softwares add the possiblity of file corruption or problems, so I have been trying to do it with just disk utility, but maybe some software would be the way to go.

which one of these is better? will do error free copies?
 
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