Time Machine - two drives?

[Tumbleweed666]

So, yesterday my five or six year old TM drive just up and died on me without so much as giving me even 5 minutes notice. The dreaded "error 8" which doesn't seem to mean much other than "buy a new drive".

So, Jeff Bezos kindly sent me a new drive in exchange for a credit card number, and that arrived today, and I'm all backed up again, and I've lost nothing other than the ability to go back and recover older stuff.

But it got me thinking, maybe i should just add a second TM drive because thats kind of irritating, IME my main use of TM has been not to recover from catastrophic errors but errors of the PEBKAC type where i fat fingered something or just made a godawful mess up of a spreadsheet or similar,and going back a few hours or in one case a month fixed it.

Anyone else using two TM drives?

FWIW I do also backup to a cloud service and also have simple automated copy of key files to two different external drives every night as well.

Plus a very intermittent copy to a separate drive which i then keep at a relatives house.

Now I type that I'm thinking i can get by with one. What do you folks do?

 

[techwarrior]

Time Capsule here, no issues for several years. Also, most of my documents are in iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive and Box, so I have cloud + Time Machine backups. TM is mainly to restore to new HDD, new Mac, or other catastrophic loss. I rarely restore previous copies of files as I try to do save often while working on important docs.

 

[Tumbleweed666]

So, after some messing around with the old drive in Disk Utility, after a complete delete and reformat its sprung into life again, so I'm going to use it as a second TM drive. No worries if it dies, worse I'll be out is an hour.