Storage Scheme for New iMac

[touchUpInside]

Interested in a new Mac to run both OS X and Windows. Currently, planning storage and backup.

Having read that, "Time Machine needs 2 to 4 times as much space."

So, would like to use two external HDDs each with Mac and Windows partitions. One would have a OS X data partition and a Windows backup partition. The other would have a Windows data partition and an OS X backup partition. This is diagrammed below.

This should work okay, right ? Thanks for any feedback.

 

[dizmonk]

I can't speak to the wisdom of that approach but that is one of the reasons I got the 3TB Fusion drive. I didn't want to get into elaborate external drive setups. If it works for you, great. I just couldn't deal with it...

 

[Weaselboy]

Having read that, "Time Machine needs 2 to 4 times as much space."

Your plan looks like it would work fine, but just to clarify how much space TM needs... this is only indirectly related to your internal drive size. If you have a 1TB internal and are only using 100GB of space on that drive, you certainly do not need a 2TB or 4TB drive for TM backup.

The reason for the multiplayer is just to allow TM to store more old versions of files. Normally a drive that is 1.5 to 2X the size of the total space used you expect to have will be plenty. So if you think with everything added to the drive you would only ever fill 500GB of space, a 1TB drive for TM would be more than enough.

 

[Lancejc]

Why use Time Machine at all? Just clone the entire disk?

Schedule a reboot on both partitions at 4am to run a (post boot) clone to usb drive.

This way whichever partition is active, the clone will backup the entire disk rather than just backing up a single partition.

 

[Lancejc]

Before the 'newb' haters roll in and say 'THAT CANT BE DONE'

The process is Called Cold Imaging -

It's used at the enterprise level. Afterall whats better than backing up a Mac/PC after the damage is done? Much better backing it up before and rolling back

http://community.norton.com/t5/Other-Norton-Products/Cold-Imaging-in-Norton-Ghost-v15/td-p/437236

 

[touchUpInside]

A concern about using disk images (rather than Time Machine) is the remote chance the SSD drive fails as it creates the image file. In that case both are gone. Though, the odds of that happening are probably along the lines of two drives failing (as in the case I originally proposed).

Thanks for the inputs !