Time Machine - is this possible?

[Benthic]

I have a Mac Pro with 3 drives currently installed: a boot drive and two data drives. The Applications are on the boot drive, my home directory is on one of the data drives, and the 3rd data drive is nothing but VMWare virtual machines.

What I would like to do is install a large 4th drive to use for Time Machine but only if it will back up all 3 of the other drives. Is that even possible? Based on what I understand Time Machine would not work that way but since I've never used it I thought I would ask here.

Thanks in advance!
B

 

[Hellhammer]

You can use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything from 3 drives to one. That'll also make that drive bootable.

 

[RandomKamikaze]

It should work. TM is meant to backup the data regardless of where it resides

 

[BobZune]

TimeMachine will work -- but if my memory serves right, but default it will exclude the non-system drives, but in the TM Options, you can remove them from the exclude list and it will back them up.

Note that the virtual machines files (virtual disks) can be LARGE and any change to them makes the entire large file looks "new" to TM, so it will back it up, depleting the TM-disk's space quickly. So you may want to consider backing up the system drive and the home-directory drive with TM, and manually backing up the virtual machine files "less frequenty" than TM backup frequency. You can use the same disk partition TM uses for that, or better yet, have a separate partition on that disk for the backup of the VM files.

 

[Benthic]

Thanks for the help folks I'll order the drive and give it a shot. If nothing else I can fall back on the CCC option

 

[justaregularjoe]

keep in mind that the fourth drive will have to be big, bordering on huge. Make sure that the size of the new drive is larger than the other three together plus a little extra. (aka dont buy a 160 GB HD to back up 3 500's. )

Go for 2 TB!