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Back-Up Time Machine

M

mac pakka

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 13, 2009
24
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Firstly, i know this has been answered before but i'm still confused. Sorry.

Anyway, my back-up routine for my iMac is basically just Time Machine to an external hard drive. My question is, how do i 'copy' my Time Machine external hard drive to another hard drive? This 2nd hard drive i will store elsewhere and 'copy' my Time Machine hard drive about every month.

I know this is probably straight forward, but it's the kinda thing i don't want to get wrong.


Many thanks.....
 
mac pakka said:
Anyway, my back-up routine for my iMac is basically just Time Machine to an external hard drive. My question is, how do i 'copy' my Time Machine external hard drive to another hard drive? This 2nd hard drive i will store elsewhere and 'copy' my Time Machine hard drive about every month.
Click to expand...

I think your strategy is flawed, and here's why. Suppose there is a bug in TM, or some other reason why a TM backed up file cannot be restored, such as for some resaon it didnt get onto a TM backup. Now, your TM backup is still useless. It happened to me once, a file I wanted to recover, for whatever reason, hadn't made it onto my TM drive.
What I think you'd be better advised to do is use something like super duper or carbon copy cloner, to take an independent copy of your data direct to a second drive.
Or, for painless offsite backup, use a backup system that backs up to the internet. Thats how I recovered that file I mentioned earlier.
 
mac pakka said:
Firstly, i know this has been answered before but i'm still confused. Sorry.

Anyway, my back-up routine for my iMac is basically just Time Machine to an external hard drive. My question is, how do i 'copy' my Time Machine external hard drive to another hard drive? This 2nd hard drive i will store elsewhere and 'copy' my Time Machine hard drive about every month.

I know this is probably straight forward, but it's the kinda thing i don't want to get wrong.


Many thanks.....
Click to expand...

Moving Time Machine to a New Hard Drive.
 
QuarterSwede said:
Bingo.

However, and you may not want to do this but, my advice is to use a backup service and get it in the cloud (Carbonite, Mozy, etc). They're cheap, a lot less of a hassle and less prone to damage.
Click to expand...

I'd agree with this: I backup using time machine for quick access and then also backup using CrashPlan (which took ages for the first backup but is much quicker now!)

I'm actually pretty paranoid about backing up data so I have a fairly extreme setup:

On top of that time machine and Crashplan, all my important documents, photos, etc are in my Dropbox (I use symlinks to store my Documents folder, Pictures folder, etc in Dropbox) and are synced to a server in a data centre (it's a mini-server from Memset that costs me around £40 a month) and that server is also backed up using crash plan

The only thing that's not backed up to the cloud are my movies and TV shows because there's over 800GB of them and being in the UK, I can't seed a backup to Crashplan (they only do that for US addresses). I therefore have a copy of my library on an old machine in another room using home sharing and then back that up using Crashplan to a disk on my Airport Extreme base station

This means for photos, documents, music, etc I have 5 copies: 1 local, 1 time machine, 1 crashplan cloud, 1 dropbox cloud and 1 datacentre server and for my tv shows and movies I have 4 copies: 1 local, 1 time machine, 1 other computer, 1 airport extreme disk
Unfortunately, I don't have off-site backups for my movies and TV shows (I'm still working on a solution for that!) but I do take my time machine backup disk with me if I'm away for any length of time and the disks are all in separate parts of the house

This is probably over-kill for a lot of people and is quite an expensive setup but it does give me peace of mind that my essential documents and photographs are well protected
 
CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper, would i use these to copy the Time Machine hard drive or my iMac hard drive??

Thanks for the link satcomer, after my original post i noticed i only had 20GB left on my 1TB hard drive so i will probably get a new 2TB hard drive for Time Machine.

Does anyone delete from Time Machine? My iMac is 320GB (nearly full), Plus another 320GB external hard drive (about 170GB used). Yet my Time Machine is at nearly 1TB. I know why this is but there is a lot of useless videos etc that i know i will never need again.
 
Here is what I do. (YMMV)
One hard drive for Time Machine
Another for a duplicate of my main drive. I use Super Duper. This is my offsite backup.
So I have a bootable snapshot of my machine at these time. I have the Time Machine back to fill the gap. I used to alternate Time Machine backup drives, but that became a pain.

My rule of thumb is to have the Time Machine drive about 2x the size of the drive(s) being backed up. Hard Drives are cheap.
If you want to delete files off of the Time Machine backup, I think SW like "Back in Time" or something like it might do it.
 
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