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Time Machine help

B

blackbirdstudio

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 10, 2014
2
0
Howdy all.

Im wondering, if its posible to use time machine to backup 4 internal drives, to 4 external drives automatically.. So mirroring 4 volumes internal, on 4 volumes external, without having to change options between each volume.

Thanks!
Dave
 
Yep... that will work fine. Just go to the options button in Time Machine setup and make sure none of the other internals are on the "exclude" list and they will all get backed up.

Then follow this to add the second and subsequent drives as backup destinations then TM will rotate using them as backup destinations.
 
It seems to me the OP wants to back up each internal drive to one specific external drive, not back up all of them to a set of rotating destinations: "mirroring 4 volumes internal, on 4 volumes external."

I don't think TM can do that without changing the settings each time. Sounds lke a good job for Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, or rsync.
 
Time Machine

If you want a straight forward mirror of each drive, you can simply use Disk Utility and RAID 1 (Mirror) each internal drive to the corresponding external drive.
If however you want to do a proper back-up using Time Machine where for example if you accidentally delete something (an app, a movie, your photos or whatever) you can then retrieve it from your back-up then as far as I'm aware the only way to do this is to make sure that the sum total of your external drives capacity (4 3TB drives making 12TB for example) is equal to or preferably exceeds the sum total of your internal drives (4 2TB drives making 8TB for example), then using a Disk Utility RAID 0 (or a hardware RAID 0 if your external drives are in a single 4 bay RAID array) RAID 0 all four external drives then set Time Machine Back-Up on your System Preferences so that on options it DOESN'T exclude any of the four internal drives and it will back them up. Phew!
I have personally done this and did have some issues with the RAID array unmounting but it should work (especially if your RAID array is better than my cheap one).
If you need to do a restore then Time Machine will only restore which ever copy of the Boot Drive you want off the Back-Up, not the Back-Ups of the internal drives. All your internal drive Back-Ups are there though but you will have to use Finder in order to retrieve them (which is relatively easy - may I suggest setting you Finder Preferences so that it displays your drives on your desktop (I do this and it can be very handy).
Hope you can follow all that as I'm not sure I explained it very clearly,
Regards,
John
 
Brian33 said:
It seems to me the OP wants to back up each internal drive to one specific external drive, not back up all of them to a set of rotating destinations: "mirroring 4 volumes internal, on 4 volumes external."
Click to expand...

Could be... hard to tell from the wording there.
 
Carbon Copy Cloner would be my answer for this. You'd have 4 "scheduled tasks" that you could set to run manually, hourly, daily, weekly or some other iteration of the aforementioned. Best to stagger the tasks time-wise.
 
BrianBaughn said:
Carbon Copy Cloner would be my answer for this. You'd have 4 "scheduled tasks" that you could set to run manually, hourly, daily, weekly or some other iteration of the aforementioned. Best to stagger the tasks time-wise.
Click to expand...

Agreed. You can even setup a scheduled task to auto run when it detects a specific drive is attached.
 
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