Time Machine help

[CB98]

I posted this in Macs but after no answers I thought I’d put it here:

I also use Time Machine to backup my working external drive which has all of my photography on it (480GB). This drive is called All Photos. If I do a Time Machine restore of my Mac (to the Macintosh HD), or a data migration, will it include all of the data on All Photos as well, or will it just restore the Macintosh HD backup (and therefore only All Photos if it was plugged in at the time). Someone please explain this to me.

I’d simply be doing this to have a second backup of my photos rather than a working restore copy. I also have CarbonCopyCloner, and maybe that would be more suited to this use case.

Thanks!

And as a bonus question, if the external hard drive is included, where exactly would it be put in the restore, seeing as normally it’s not within the Macintosh HD files as it’s an external drive.

 

[techwarrior]

TM Restore preserves file paths, so assuming /Volumes/[YOUR EXT DRIVENAME] was present when the backup occurred, files from that path will be restored to that path.

TM restore can take a long time, adding external drives adds to the time of the restore. If you have an alternate way to backup the external drive, that might be a better strategy as the chances of both a boot drive and external drive failure at the same time are probably pretty slim. Plus, if the external drive fails, restoring just that without having to mess with the OS would be much faster. CCC is probably a good bet for the external drive.

The other thing you can consider is a RAID enclosure for the external drive. With a disk array, the RAID device can maintain a mirror image (RAID1) (2 disks), or striped image (RAID5) (3+ disks). In the event of a drive failing, the data is restored when the one failed disk is replaced.

With that much data, several layers of backup are worth considering, a cheap insurance policy if the data is important to your livelihood. Ultimately, offsite images on top of locally stored images may be the safest strategy.

 

[CB98]

TM Restore preserves file paths, so assuming /Volumes/[YOUR EXT DRIVENAME] was present when the backup occurred, files from that path will be restored to that path.

TM restore can take a long time, adding external drives adds to the time of the restore. If you have an alternate way to backup the external drive, that might be a better strategy as the chances of both a boot drive and external drive failure at the same time are probably pretty slim. Plus, if the external drive fails, restoring just that without having to mess with the OS would be much faster. CCC is probably a good bet for the external drive.

The other thing you can consider is a RAID enclosure for the external drive. With a disk array, the RAID device can maintain a mirror image (RAID1) (2 disks), or striped image (RAID5) (3+ disks). In the event of a drive failing, the data is restored when the one failed disk is replaced.

With that much data, several layers of backup are worth considering, a cheap insurance policy if the data is important to your livelihood. Ultimately, offsite images on top of locally stored images may be the safest strategy.

Many thanks. So let’s say I plugged the backup drive (with Macintosh HD and All Photos on it) to restore and the original All Photos drive wasn’t attached to the Mac (meaning Time Machine could only find Macintosh HD). What would happen then? Would All Photos go onto Macintosh HD? Or would there be an error and it wouldn’t go anywhere (and only Macintosh HD would be restored).

At this point I’ve gone the CCC route. Just asking this out of curiosity.

 

[techwarrior]

If the ext drive is not connected when you do a full system restore, it will skip the external drive folder.

Some guy named Pondini had a site with all kinds of gory details about TM. I have seen a number of references to his old site over the years, and it looks like much of this is based on much older OS versions, but likely a majority of it is still relevant. If you are interested, it looks like it moved to:

http://www.baligu.com/pondini/TM/Home.html
http://www.baligu.com/pondini/TM/E3.html (I think this might help you understand what happen when the ext drive is not attached when running restore).