Can I daisy chain my backup volumes?

[Miqs]

I have a WD My Book 500gb which is full and now deleting all earlier backups. I want to buy a 1TB same WD extra volume but keep my old 500gb as an additional backup. Can I daisy chain them together using Firewire connectors? I understand there will be desktop icons for both drives but will they interface with each other? For example, when the new one is full, will my backups then automatically transfer to the old one again and start to delete as now? Or will I have to manually select each drive from my desktop? I suspect you can daisy chain FW drives easily, but I don't think Time Machine works with multiple drives.

 

[MCAsan]

Bite the bullet and get two 3TB or 4TB drives. You can get them easily in the $100 range at Sams, Costco, Newegg...etc.. Put them on your holiday gift list. Use one for files/libraries that you don't want on the internal drive. Use the second drive for Time Machine backup of everything.

Pass on the smaller drives to folks who have much less data to backup.

 

[Miqs]

That's a bloody good answer! You are right! I can get a 3 TB drive for the same money … hadn't thought about that! Any favourites that will work ok with firewire and Time Machine?

 

[MCAsan]

There are Seagate 3TBs in my LaCie 2Big 6TB and Seagate 3TB in our two Time Capsules. You can probably find external drives with enclosures that do FW.....but that interface is getting very long in the tooth. You need to be planning to move to newer machines with USB 3 and TB.

 

[Miqs]

There are Seagate 3TBs in my LaCie 2Big 6TB and Seagate 3TB in our two Time Capsules. You can probably find external drives with enclosures that do FW.....but that interface is getting very long in the tooth. You need to be planning to move to newer machines with USB 3 and TB.

Thanks but my iMac is also long in the tooth and only has USB 2. I anticipate that this is slower than FW?

 

[Richdmoore]

Osx disk utility allows you to link (jbod) disks together. The issue is that when you create the set, you destroy all the original data on the disks.

I addition, you increase the chance of failure, as there is twice as much that can go wrong mechanically.

Here is the link if interested:

http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/ss/raidjbod.htm


That being said, for time machine usb2 is fine, even if slower than firewire. Unless you are restoring data, it pretty much does it's stuff in the background anyway, so not a big thing it it takes a second or two more per backup event.

 

[priitv8]

...but I don't think Time Machine works with multiple drives.

Starting with 10.8 Mountain Lion, TM is able to back up to multiple volumes (eg 2 different USB drives). But it does this in a round-robin manner. Meaning, with 3 drives, it will back up to same volume once in every 3 hours.
You just need to add all the volumes you want to the list in TM preference pane on the Mac.