I just replaced my main harddrive with a SSD and placed my 500gb into an optibay. I have moved my home folder to the 2ndary drive and changed all the mappings. If i understand time machine correctly, it mainly backs up all the files and settings. Since I have my home folder on the 2ndary drive, would there be any point of using time machine to back up and be stored on the same 2ndary drive? Thanks!
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Time machine and 2nd HD with optibay
- Thread starter Imsuperjp
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Since your home folder is moved (not copied) to the second HDD, it is not a backup, but using Time Machine to backup to the same HDD would be negating its purpose, as one should use an extra HDD for backing up.
I have an SSD in my Optibay adapter and the HDD in my HDD bay, the home folder is on the SSD, my SSD gets cloned to a partition on the HDD daily, thus I can boot from there, if necessary.
As for my backup procedure: I have one 500 GB HDD for my photographs (digital and analog) libraries and editing documents, one 500 GB HDD with my personal video footage in an editing friendly format.
Both 500 GB HDDs get backed up to one 1 TB HDD via CarbonCopyCloner.
And that 1 TB HDD gets backed up to another 1 TB HDD via CarbonCopyCloner.
Therefore I have three copies of my important data.
I have an SSD in my Optibay adapter and the HDD in my HDD bay, the home folder is on the SSD, my SSD gets cloned to a partition on the HDD daily, thus I can boot from there, if necessary.
As for my backup procedure: I have one 500 GB HDD for my photographs (digital and analog) libraries and editing documents, one 500 GB HDD with my personal video footage in an editing friendly format.
Both 500 GB HDDs get backed up to one 1 TB HDD via CarbonCopyCloner.
And that 1 TB HDD gets backed up to another 1 TB HDD via CarbonCopyCloner.
Therefore I have three copies of my important data.
Do you think I should move my home folder back to my SSD (main) and use the 2ndary one for time machine? Its a 128gb SSD and I dont have much music/movie if any.
That is up to you, I have a 120 GB SSD and a 500 GB HDD, and have still 50 GB left on the SSD, as it houses only my application and settings and some files I use, and my Dropbox folder.
The HDD is used to store bigger files, like video footage or project media, and entertainment and such. The HDD also has the aforementioned clone of the SSD.
It is also advisable, if you use the HDD to store your home folder, to have an admin account on the SSD, in case you can't login into your account, which happened to me once when having the account on a separate storage device.
As I don't use Time Machine, I can't advise you on your TM usage, but I am also used to external HDDs, thus backing up to an external HDD is no problem for me.
I also don't use the folders like Documents, Music , Photos and Movies Mac OS X provides, I have my own structured chaos.
Anyway, since TM is not bootable, I see no point in using TM, especially not on an internal HDD, and I never needed to restore an accidentally deleted file since using Mac OS X, even as I am a bit clumsy.
Time Machine FAQ
As both are connected directly via SATA, 50 GB takes around 17 minutes at an average speed of 50 MB/s, take or add 10 minutes for speed variance.
Also know, that once you have done the first clone, only data that is changed will be cloned, thus subsequent clones will not take as long.
And if you do that, make an extra partition for the clone, my SSD clone partition is a big as the SSD, you can add some GB if you want, as once you delete files from the SSD and do another clone, the files on the clone, that are deleted on the SSD, will be moved to a backup folder, and if you want to keep that folder's contents, the cloned partition might fill up fast, depending on your file usage patterns.
____________________________________________________________
Links to guides on how to use Disk Utility, the application Mac OS X provides for managing internal and external HDD/SSDs and its formats.
Guide on how to use Disk Utility from the restore / installation DVD.
Using Disk Utility - Formatting, Partitioning, Verifying, and Repairing Disks
____________________________________________________________Using Disk Utility - Formatting, Partitioning, Verifying, and Repairing Disks
which includes:
DiskWiping One Pass is Enough- Format, Erase, or Reformat a Drive
- Erase or Reformat a Partition
- Add a Partition
- Deleting and Resizing Partitions
- Disk Formats