Time Machine question

[pastrychef]

Hypothetically, if I have four hard drives in my system and they are set us:

1. OS X boot drive.
2. iTunes drive.
3. Junk drive, where I keep all kinds of stuff from movies to work documents to images.
4. Time Machine drive. (Keeps backups of drives 1-3)

In the above instance, if either drive 2 or 3 dies, how would I recover from Time Machine?

I've been using this setup for quite a long time and have never had to do any recovery but just realized that if I did, I wouldn't know how to go about doing it. lol

Thanks in advance.

 

[bokkow]

You can simply go "into" your Time Machine and browse the missing drive as if it was still working and copy & paste the whole thing back to a new drive

Btw; your 4th drive must be a big one compared to 1-3?

My redundancy (!not backup!) plan is 4 x 3TB RAID 10. Wouldn't have a clue how to start rebuilding it once a drive fails... And backup is Cloud storage for important stuff and some external HDD's lying around for iTunes and such.

 

[pommie82]

The best thing I could suggest is google carbon clone and you can back as much stuff as you like and you can make it bootable have been using it for about 2 years it has working great for me I have over 6tb of movies on my iTunes library and I have a primary and a second drive and it works really well and you can back up the two drives at the same time works wonders

 

[h9826790]

You can actually Enter Time Machine now and have a look. Then try to recovery a junk file to any location. The process should be very very straight forward.

 

[pastrychef]

You can simply go "into" your Time Machine and browse the missing drive as if it was still working and copy & paste the whole thing back to a new drive

Btw; your 4th drive must be a big one compared to 1-3?

My redundancy (!not backup!) plan is 4 x 3TB RAID 10. Wouldn't have a clue how to start rebuilding it once a drive fails... And backup is Cloud storage for important stuff and some external HDD's lying around for iTunes and such.

Yes. Drives 1-3 are relatively small.

1. 512GB M.2 SSD.
2. 1TB iTunes drive.
3. 2TB Assorted/Random storage.

I also have an eight drive RAID array with dual disk redundancy for storage of more important stuff that doesn't change often.
[doublepost=1471546237][/doublepost]

The best thing I could suggest is google carbon clone and you can back as much stuff as you like and you can make it bootable have been using it for about 2 years it has working great for me I have over 6tb of movies on my iTunes library and I have a primary and a second drive and it works really well and you can back up the two drives at the same time works wonders

Yes, I do have a bootable backup of my boot drive. That's not what concerned me.

I always knew how to recover my boot drive if/when there's a failure. I just never knew how to recover the non-boot drives from Time Machine.
[doublepost=1471546311][/doublepost]

You can actually Enter Time Machine now and have a look. Then try to recovery a junk file to any location. The process should be very very straight forward.

For example, if my iTunes drive died and I popped in a replacement, I wouldn't be able to open music library to enter Time Machine... Well, let me try and play with it a bit...
[doublepost=1471546361][/doublepost]Thanks for the answers, guys. I'll mess around with it a bit...

 

[h9826790]

For example, if my iTunes drive died and I popped in a replacement, I wouldn't be able to open music library to enter Time Machine... Well, let me try and play with it a bit...
[doublepost=1471546361][/doublepost]Thanks for the answers, guys. I'll mess around with it a bit...

It doesn't matter. Just open finder, enter Time Machine, roll back to a specific time / date, then the iTunes drive / folder will magically appear inside Time Machine, so that you can recovery the files.

 

[mpainesyd]

Be careful how you use a RAID drive. I had a Lacie dual drive that came set up for RAID. After several years of use one of the drives failed. To my surprise it was impossible to recover the"duplicate" data from the second drive. I tried a wide range of solutions without success and eventually gave up. Fortunately it was a backup drive and I lost very little unique data but I no longer use RAID (I realise there are several RAID configurations but no suit my needs).

 

[AidenShaw]

I also have an eight drive RAID array with dual disk redundancy for storage or more important stuff that doesn't change often...

Friendly question - is it RAID-6 ?

 

[pastrychef]

Friendly question - is it RAID-6 ?

I use Synology DSM with Synology Hybrid RAID 2 (aka SHR2), which from what I understand, is essentially LVM + mdadm in a RAID 6 configuration.

 

[flat five]

For example, if my iTunes drive died and I popped in a replacement, I wouldn't be able to open music library to enter Time Machine...

if your itunes drive dies:

• replace the drive
• enter time machine
• navigate to a time prior to the drive going kaput
(you can navigate through a time machine slice in the same way you would finder.app)
• go to your music folder (for example)
• right-click the folder:



• choose Restore "<folder/file(s)>" to...
• direct it to your fresh drive or desired location

 

[pastrychef]

Thanks!