Time Machine question

[archer75]

So when you have two hard drives for time machine to use does it just make two backups of your system on each drive or does it make one backup until one drive fills up and then just continue the backup over to the next drive?

 

[Jolly Giant]

So when you have two hard drives for time machine to use does it just make two backups of your system on each drive or does it make one backup until one drive fills up and then just continue the backup over to the next drive?

no to both.

you can only specify one destination drive @ a time and TM will not continue backups to a second drive when the first one is full.

instead, when TM runs out of space, it will start deleting older backups to make room for new ones.

 

[r0k]

This is one aspect of TM that gets on my nerves. TM only knows how to deal with one drive at a time. Being a cautious sort of guy, I wish TM would make multiple backups across multiple drives, ie a local backup on a FW drive and a network backup to a TC or other NAS drive. No such luck. TM will use one at a time. I suppose what you could do is set TM up to back up to a certain USB drive and whenever you plug it in, TM will start spinning. You can then plug in a different drive and set TM up to use that one. I seem to recall that when you plug the first one back in again, it asks you if you can to use it for backups. This saves you manually switching in system preferences but you are still only using one at any given time.

 

[Plymouthbreezer]

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Since OS X doesn't allow multiple disks to be synced, I use one external with TM, and another external as a manual backup. I think that Western Digital now has backup software (??) that works with Macs, so maybe that's another alternative.

 

[Jolly Giant]

This is one aspect of TM that gets on my nerves.

why ? who needs ages old backups ?

Being a cautious sort of guy, I wish TM would make multiple backups across multiple drives, ie a local backup on a FW drive and a network backup to a TC or other NAS drive.

instead of using TM to back up to two different drives, rather use TM on one, and make a bootable clone of your Mac's drive to another via e.g. Carbon Copy Cloner. CCC will also update the clone incrementally and can be configured to do so automatically.