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Help with network drive

C

case2001

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 9, 2010
356
52
Hi everyone!

I am not sure if this is the correct forum, but my MacMini is a 2009 and has an external 1TB USB drive. I have this drive mapped to my MacBook Air for iTunes. I use the external drive as Time Machine for my Mac Mini. I synch my iPhone with the MacMini as well. Finally, we keep all our digital photos on the external drive. My process for backing up the external data USB drive is to use Carbon Copy cloner to clone the drive to a second external 1TB once a month. I leave the MacMini on all the time and it is on a UPS.

Is this safe? Should I be doing something else to back up all our music, photos, and data?

We only have about 500gigs of data currently and have stayed around this level for the last year or so.

Thanks for the help.
 
The only gap I see there in your plan is you have nothing stored "offsite", so if the house burns down or someone steals your stuff, you have lost it all. You might want to consider a second backup set of drives you could rotate out to a friend's house or where you work to get it offsite. Or even easier, subscribe to an online backup service like Crashplan to automate offsite storage.
 
Help with network drive

I need to have an off site plan. I could get a third drive and carry it to the office once a month too. Do you think that would cover everything?
 
You should visit the CCC site and read the FAQ about whether it can clone a time machine disk. http://help.bombich.com/kb/troubleshooting/cloning-a-time-machine-backup

You must use block level cloning and…

Time Machine is a highly proprietary Apple device, and the block-copy tool that CCC uses to clone it is also Apple proprietary. Given the limited access that CCC has to the implementation details of both Time Machine and the block-copy tool, support for cloning Time Machine volumes is "Best Effort"
Click to expand...

Personally, I would never use a time machine disk for anything else, definitely not for my iTunes library.
 
Boyd01 said:
You should visit the CCC site and read the FAQ about whether it can clone a time machine disk. http://help.bombich.com/kb/troubleshooting/cloning-a-time-machine-backup

You must use block level cloning and…



Personally, I would never use a time machine disk for anything else, definitely not for my iTunes library.
Click to expand...

I may be misreading what the OP is saying, but I don't think he is using CCC to clone his Time Machine backup, it appears he is only using it to copy the other data on the disk. There is no reason one disk can't be used for both Time Machine and other data as long as one recognizes that data is not getting backed up, and it looks like OP is working around that with the CCC clone.
 
You may be right, I thought he was cloning the entire external drive in which case the portion of it that contains time machine backups might be unreadable.

I understand that you *can* use the same drive for backups and data, but *I* don't. I want my backup disk to just be a backup disk. And I want at least two dedicated backup disks for each of my drives.

If you are mixing time machine and iTunes on the same disk and it fails you will lose all your archived backups and will only have the CCC drive with iTunes, which might be a month old with the OP's scheme.

I keep two separate backup disks of my iTunes library and two separate backup disks of my MBA 512gb SSD, one of which is a bootable clone. I also have a time capsule.
 
WeaselBoy is correct. I am using CCC to clone the data on the drive. The drive does contain my Time Machine backup. I don't really care about that though. It is really the raw data on the drive (photos, music, word and excel files).

I am sorry for the confusion.
 
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