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backup one external drive to another automatically

bigbadneil

bigbadneil

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 18, 2009
360
3
Guys,
I just bought a new 3TB G Raid external hard drive that I want to use to store my photos on, is there a way to automatically back up this new drive to another external drive???
 
bigbadneil said:
I have time machine on my iMac but I thought that was only for backing up the iMac to an external drive????
Thanks for you reply though
Click to expand...

You can backup any HDD, internal or external, formatted for Mac OS X, via Time Machine. You just have to make sure, the external HDD is NOT excluded in System Preferences > Time Machine > Options.
 
simsaladimbamba said:
You can backup any HDD, internal or external, formatted for Mac OS X, via Time Machine. You just have to make sure, the external HDD is NOT excluded in System Preferences > Time Machine > Options.
Click to expand...
Sir,
sory if I sound stupid but I can't find how to backup from one external drive to another external drive??
I can see where I can back up mu iMac to the 3TB external drive but not the 3TB drive to another 1TB external drive
 
bigbadneil said:
Sir,
sory if I sound stupid but I can't find how to backup from one external drive to another external drive??
I can see where I can back up mu iMac to the 3TB external drive but not the 3TB drive to another 1TB external drive
Click to expand...

Ah, you want to backup that one new HDD to another HDD, and that other HDD is not the HDD holding the iMac backup.
TM does not allow two HDDs used as backup device, it only uses one HDD.

For your purpose look into CarbonCopyCloner, as mentioned before, it allows you to do scheduled backups too.
 
Sorry one last thing
I have a 1TB iMac, 3TB and 1TB external Hard drive, how should I back everything up??
My original plan was to keep al my pictures on the new 3TB drive and back them up on the 1TB drive but after sleeping on it I am now thinking I would be better just keeping my pictures on the iMac until they get to say 500 GB and then save them on the 3TB drive and start a new library on the iMac, in the meantime just use time machine to back up my iMac hard drive on the 3TB drive.............what do you think???
 
bigbadneil said:
Sorry one last thing
I have a 1TB iMac, 3TB and 1TB external Hard drive, how should I back everything up??
My original plan was to keep al my pictures on the new 3TB drive and back them up on the 1TB drive but after sleeping on it I am now thinking I would be better just keeping my pictures on the iMac until they get to say 500 GB and then save them on the 3TB drive and start a new library on the iMac, in the meantime just use time machine to back up my iMac hard drive on the 3TB drive.............what do you think???
Click to expand...

The 3TB G-Raid probably uses two 1.5TB HDDs, if that is the case, I would do the following:

The iMac stores the photos on it
G-Raid, use each HDD separately as backup, either as Time Machine on one HDD and a scheduled clone of the TM backup to the other HDD, meaning you have two backups and the existing files on the iMac.

CycleOfBackup.png



I always have two backups of my digitally shot photos and my digitally shot videos, thus I have three copies, in case one or two HDDs die, I still have enough time to backup to another HDD.
 
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