How To Back Up To Different HD's

[Bazza01]

Im currently using a 3TB Airport Time Capusle to back up my internal HD.

This is getting to its limit so I have bought 2 X WD Book Thunderport external HD's as I want to store my movies, pictures and music on WD Book No1 and use WD Book No2 to backup WD Book No1.

The remainder of my files will stay on my Mac HD and be backed up by the Time Capsule.

How do I configure my Mac to tell WD No2 to backup WD No1 only?

Do I need specialist software to do this or does the Mac have something already to handle this?

Thanks for your help.

 

[phrehdd]

There are ways to do this with scripts but you might want to investigate CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) and SuperDuper. These are both popular software offerings and then there are more business oriented offerings like Retrospect.

CCC and SD are both easy to use.

 

[satcomer]

Im currently using a 3TB Airport Time Capusle to back up my internal HD.

This is getting to its limit so I have bought 2 X WD Book Thunderport external HD's as I want to store my movies, pictures and music on WD Book No1 and use WD Book No2 to backup WD Book No1.

The remainder of my files will stay on my Mac HD and be backed up by the Time Capsule.

How do I configure my Mac to tell WD No2 to backup WD No1 only?

Do I need specialist software to do this or does the Mac have something already to handle this?

Thanks for your help.

Time Machice is simple backup to one drive. You would need something like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper or ChronoSync to do specialized backup.

 

[Weaselboy]

Do I need specialist software to do this or does the Mac have something already to handle this?

Two ways to go here. The first is just keep using Time Machine and use WD2 as a second Time machine destination. Then Time Machine will just take turns backing up to the Time Capsule on hour then WD2 the second hour and so on. By default Time Machine excludes external drives from backup, so once you add the music and all to WD1, you will need to go into Time Machine preferences and remove WD1 from the excluded list. This will backup the entire OS and all your data and WD1 onto both the Time Capsule and WD2. It sounds like you may not have enough space on the the Time Capsule to do this though?

The other option is use the software Carbon Copy Cloner to backup WD2 to WD1 on whatever schedule you want. It is very easy to configure, but costs money.

Also, included in OS X is a command line utility called rsync that could be configured to do this, but it is not as easy to configure or use. Here is the rsync documentation.

 

[Alrescha]

Do I need specialist software to do this or does the Mac have something already to handle this?

I use rsync to back up external drives and I let Time Machine take care of the internal/boot drive. Worth mentioning: in the context of this discussion, Carbon Copy Cloner is just a GUI for rsync.

A.

 

[Ebenezum]

Do I need specialist software to do this or does the Mac have something already to handle this?

If you need to make backups only occasionally Disk Utility (Utilities folder) could be sufficient, it is considerable slower than CCC and SD so you get what you pay for...

If your data is important I don't recommend relying only on Time Machine, I wouldn't call it the most reliable backup software.

 

[Bazza01]

All,

Thanks for your replies.

I would be inclined to buy CCC. The interface from what I can see looks quite simple and easy to use which suits me!

I looked at the script for RSYNC but this scares the pants off of me!! So I will avoid this.

Thank you.