Syncing two external hard drives

[Ja Di ksw]

Hi everyone. I have a Western Digital My Book Essential (2 TB) from Christmas last year, but in case it ever breaks I would like to set up another external HD to be a mirror copy of it, preferably automatically, so I don't lose all of my files. Is this possible? Thanks in advance

 

[MacUser2525]

Hi everyone. I have a Western Digital My Book Essential (2 TB) from Christmas last year, but in case it ever breaks I would like to set up another external HD to be a mirror copy of it, preferably automatically, so I don't lose all of my files. Is this possible? Thanks in advance

SuperDuper! does what you want and I believe Carbon Copy Cloner as well has the automatic scheduling for a backup. Or if you are cheap SOB like me a simple bash script and a cron job would do the same thing.

 

[Weaselboy]

Hi everyone. I have a Western Digital My Book Essential (2 TB) from Christmas last year, but in case it ever breaks I would like to set up another external HD to be a mirror copy of it, preferably automatically, so I don't lose all of my files. Is this possible? Thanks in advance

You can use SD or CCC like MacUser2525 suggested, or if you just want redundant backups, Time Machine can backup to multiple external disks. You can leave both plugged in and the hourly backups will alternate between disks. Or you can just swap them around manually and it will backup to both. That might be easier than trying to copy the backups to another disk all the time.

 

[Ja Di ksw]

Thanks for the tips

 

[seismick]

Alternatively, you can do time machine backups to your second external HDD that includes both your mac's hard drive and your first external HDD. To do so, open time machine preferences --> options --> remove first external HDD from "exclude these items from backup" list.

 

[MCAsan]

Don't mix up to separate issues....availability and backups.

Use RAID 1 to maintain high availability. If one drive dies you can still read/write to the mate.

Use a backup to be prepared to restore from partial or complete loss of the file system.

I use LaCie 2Big in RAID 1 mode for high availability and Time Capsule for backup.