Designate multiple target drives for Time Machine?

Discussion in 'macOS' started by riverteeth, Apr 23, 2008.

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  1. riverteeth, Apr 23, 2008

    riverteeth macrumors newbie

    Joined:
    Apr 16, 2008
    #1
    Sorry if this question has been addressed before; I did a search, but I'm not even sure what terms to search for on this, and I can't find any info at the apple site.

    I want to know if I can designate multiple target drives for Time Machine to back up to. Besides my 200 GB internal drive, I have about 350 GB of data on external drives that I'd like to back up. I've bought a 750 GB drive and designated it as my "time machine drive," so this should cover everything, but as apple points out on the site, the larger your time machine drive, the farther you can "see" back into the past. I have two other drives I could use for backup, one 320 and 160 GB, and if I could tie at least one into the time machine loop with the 750, that would be ideal. Otherwise, maybe I should just leave the 750 for my most important stuff, and manually back up the rest to the other drives.

    Thanks!
     
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  2. xraydoc, Apr 23, 2008

    xraydoc macrumors demi-god

    xraydoc

    Joined:
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    Location:
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    #2
    Time Machine will back up to one drive only. You can manually switch it, but its a pain and I suspect since it wasn't really designed for more than one drive, who knows what might go wrong.

    If you really want, you can combine all your spare drives into one big volume with Disk Utility - a "RAID" (though not really a redundant array) called JBOD ("just a bunch of disks"). It'll combine them all into one volume (750+320+160GB = 1230GB). However, if one drive of the three should fail or even not mount correctly when powering up your machine, you'll potentially lose everything on the volume.

    Personally, I don't recommend doing the above, but it can be done rather easily.
     
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  3. operator207, Apr 23, 2008

    operator207 macrumors 6502

    Joined:
    Jul 24, 2007
    #3
    Do your time machine backup.

    Run rsync to sync *that* backup to another drive. Or if you want bit for bit, dd it to another drive.

    rsync gives you the ability to do this over a network.

    You know when time machine is going to do its backups, just make sure rsync runs shortly after it.
     
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