So, I am trying to track down a Gen2 Intel 160gb SSD to do this Mod. I havent tried the Time Machine yet though.
My question is: On the 2nd drive, my current 500gb stock drive from apple, can I just create a 160gb partition for time machine to backup my Intel, or does it have to be external? I think it is all automatic too, right? The backup, that is. Also, does it backup the whole drive? Including OSX files?
To answer your questions:
- You need to declare the second disk a "Time Machine" disk - just tell TM that you want to back up on that drive. You don't need a separate partition. You can just back up the SSD to the HD. It won't override anything, it will just create a backup folder which lives happily next to any other stuff you might throw on the drive.
- You will probably need to tell TM to _not_ back up the second disk as you can't back up a disk onto itself. I haven't had two fixed HDs yet but I think TM will want to back up all internal drives by default, so you need to exclude the drive from TM. Easy to do in the TM preferences.
- TM backs up the whole drive including OS X files. The only thing it doesn't do is create a bootable OS X install. So in order to recover via TM, you need to start from CD or another bootable OS X install, then use TM to recover _everything_.
- Cloning is possible too but it takes much longer than TM - that's because TM uses information from spotlight to determine which files have changed. That's what makes TM incredibly fast and seamless. CCC or another cloner need to run rsync to check which files differ, which takes a pretty long time. The advantage is that you end up with a bootable partition for instant recovery, the disadvantage is that you can't run it every hour like TM, takes way too long and uses way too many resources.
- TM does incremental backups which means you can go back in history as drive space allows, another advantage over cloning.
I think that TM is the better solution - recovery from complete loss of hard drive takes much longer than a clone, but how often do you expect that to happen? You'd be pretty unlucky if it happened more than 1x per year. Hopefully the SSD will be much more robust than a HD too.
In all other aspects, TM is vastly superior to a clone.
. i dont mind about not getting 64-bit apps. my Hackintosh that is still not feasible for me to order yet will be 64-bit and using more RAM than a 32-bit system can handle so hopefully that will be snappy.
