Time Machine & 2 External HD's

[FriDay85]

I currently have a Western Digital External HD that i use with time machine to backup my iMac.

I am going to buy another external Western Digital HD, so i can have to backups, just in case one of the external HD's fails.

My question is, will i be able to plug in both external HD's at the same time, for Timemachine to perform the same backup to each drive?

Thanks.

 

[fluffyx]

Time Machine won't do this automatically; you'd have to switch backup disks manually each time you wanted to back up to the other disk.

Time Machine isn't really meant to be used in the way that you describe. If you want to have triple redundancy, it might be more worthwhile to pay for an off-site backup service (Backblaze.com is $5/mo for unlimited backup storage). It'd be quite anticlimactic if you had three backups in your home, and a natural disaster destroyed all three.

You're absolutely right that every hard drive will fail, but I'm not sure having TWO backup hard drives is best solution in most cases. It's somewhat unlikely that both your internal drive and your backup drive would fail at once—but if that happened, you could restore from Backblaze.

 

[Scottyk9]

Agree, no easy way to do this with Time Machine.

There may be value in using a second backup as a bootable backup - in the case of a hard drive failure, you can be up and working in no time. Software that can assist you with this are synk (I use this), chronosync, and others.

Also agree that the ideal backup would have a local backup as well as a backup at a remote site - fire / water damage for example would affect both of your local backups