Internal HD and Time Machine

[dvince2]

Hi everyone.
I'm looking to get a MacPro after Macworld (fingers crossed with core i7 ) and have a question about time machine.
Does it have to back up to an external drive? or can i back up to a second internal drive inside the computer? (eg 500GB for OSX and another 500-1TB hd internal for time machine)?

 

[ceres]

Internal is fine.

 

[rockinrocker]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/607793/

 

[inigel]

Internal is great that it has a fast read/write time. The downside is that if your computer gets stolen, so does your backup.

 

[fredr500]

Not a real backup

My house was struck by lightning. I lost 5 computers to the surge, even though all were on UPS units and 3 were not turned on. Thankfully I only lost 1 hard drive.

If your drive is connected to the power line, it is not a true backup.

What I do is keep TM on an external drive 24/7. Then every Saturday I disconnect it and connect a different drive, transfer TM to it and let it do a backup. Then eject it, switch TM back, unplug it from everything and take it to work for off-site backup.

Nothing will stop a direct lightning strike. Insurance will buy new hardware, but your back-up better be offline.

Paranoid? Yep. Deserved? Yep.

Fred

 

[WPB2]

My house was struck by lightning. I lost 5 computers to the surge, even though all were on UPS units and 3 were not turned on. Thankfully I only lost 1 hard drive.

If your drive is connected to the power line, it is not a true backup.

What I do is keep TM on an external drive 24/7. Then every Saturday I disconnect it and connect a different drive, transfer TM to it and let it do a backup. Then eject it, switch TM back, unplug it from everything and take it to work for off-site backup.

Nothing will stop a direct lightning strike. Insurance will buy new hardware, but your back-up better be offline.

Paranoid? Yep. Deserved? Yep.

Fred

So I guess you don't believe the old saying "lighting never strikes the same place twice".

 

[WPB2]

Hi everyone.
I'm looking to get a MacPro after Macworld (fingers crossed with core i7 ) and have a question about time machine.
Does it have to back up to an external drive? or can i back up to a second internal drive inside the computer? (eg 500GB for OSX and another 500-1TB hd internal for time machine)?

You don't need timemachine if you want an internal backup, all you have to do is create a mirrored Raid using Disc utility, then everything you put onto your main HD is automatically written to however many HD's you can fit into the MacPro (I think its 4).

 

[sickmacdoc]

You don't need timemachine if you want an internal backup, all you have to do is create a mirrored Raid using Disc utility, then everything you put onto your main HD is automatically written to however many HD's you can fit into the MacPro (I think its 4).

True to an extent of course- but then you do not have the ability to look back and retrieve earlier revision of documents which is a main selling point of Time Machine in the first place.

Another point it that it is not providing a backup in the true sense of the word. An example of that would be when you trash an important document in error (stuff happens in the best of times)- with a mirrored RAID your backup of the document is erased at the same time so nothing to restore from. A mirrored RAID may give a little more feeling of security, but it is no way a replacement for a Time Machine backup (or better a Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper backup clone) IMO.

 

[WPB2]

True to an extent of course- but then you do not have the ability to look back and retrieve earlier revision of documents which is a main selling point of Time Machine in the first place.

Another point it that it is not providing a backup in the true sense of the word. An example of that would be when you trash an important document in error (stuff happens in the best of times)- with a mirrored RAID your backup of the document is erased at the same time so nothing to restore from. A mirrored RAID may give a little more feeling of security, but it is no way a replacement for a Time Machine backup (or better a Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper backup clone) IMO.

yeah, didn't think of it that way. I was more or less thinking in the case where you have a harddrive failure, you wouldn't lose all important stuff.

 

[pwn247]

I picked up a dinky little 80GB drive at a yard sale a while back; tossed it into bay #3, and it's used for Time Machine to keep my home business website and graphic design work all backed up.

A few days ago I was organizing my folders and accidentally deleted a huge pack of leaderboards I was working on. Dozens of hours of work in Photoshop- gone. Likely hundreds of dollars down the drain. LUCKILY Time Machine had it backed up, and I retrieved the files perfectly fine.

If I had been using Windows (and it's lack of decent backup software), that work would've been gone forever.


Moral of the story is: Time Machine works, and it works fine with even dinky little 80GB internal drives.