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gwelmarten

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 17, 2011
476
0
England!
Hi

I have a USB drive with a Time Machine Backup, along with a lot of other stuff.

I am cautious about what would happen if I lost the drive due to failure, so have purchased another one of equal capacity.

I know Time Machine uses complex methods for linking files.

Every month, I want to be able to update one HDD with the contents of the other. Because of the complexity of TM backups, I'm guessing a simple rsync is out of the question. And I don't want to format one drive every month and then re-image it, as that will reduce it's life.

Does anybody have any ideas on how I could solve this problem? I did think that I could do some kind of complex Rsync, that synced everything from one drive to the other except files ending in .sparsebundle, but wasn't sure if that'd work because the .sparsebundle is more of a folder? I could then use Mountaion Lion's multi-drive backup feature to allow me to keep the TM backups on both devices of high quality (so one is updated hourly, the other monthly).

Any more ideas, or comments as to if what I am proposing will work?

Thanks,

Sam
 
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