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zjazz

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 7, 2011
363
64
HI,
Many of you may know my recent story about my storage/backup external HD loosing info.
Now I have two external HD, so I want to have 2 HD of my stuff to have good backup. Do I need to backup my Time Machine? In case yes, then I will end up with two TM, and I will have to clone 2nd periodically, which is a lot of work.

So question to you pro's. What is the best way to store your files on external drive plus have a time machine backup on separate drive, and then for assurance to have third HD to clone all of the above in separate partitions for backup? :confused:
 
Why not clone your hard drive instead of the Time Machine volumes :confused:

If you clone the TM volume, you copy all of the incremental backups and in the even of a failure that really doesn't buy you too much.

I use Carbon Copy Cloner to create an image backup that I take offsite and run a Time Machine backup on my NAS
 
Why not clone your hard drive instead of the Time Machine volumes :confused:

If you clone the TM volume, you copy all of the incremental backups and in the even of a failure that really doesn't buy you too much.

I use Carbon Copy Cloner to create an image backup that I take offsite and run a Time Machine backup on my NAS

The thing is that I'm not storing all the info on my HD of my MBP. I use external HD where I store files. And I just can copy with CCC it to second HD for a backup. But what about Time Machine? Should I have a copy of it as well?

Or maybe I need to have a better strategy for storage, backup of storage and time machine? Any advices of how you guys have a storage/backup backed up?
 
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So nobody here wants to share their best strategy for storing files, backing them up and how to handle time machine (to back it up or not?)
 
You can basically just drag n drop the Time Machine folder from one drive to another and it will copy. Time Machine will have no problem detecting the copy on the other drive.

This is the folder below you should copy. You'll see it as soon as you click on your Time Machine drive/partition.
 

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At the moment here is what I have:

TimeMachine for incremental back ups

I image my HDD, SSD and a copy of all my home movies and photos as bootable every couple of months and store it someplace.

I run Apples Back Up utility once a month and back up my email, some documents, keychain and a few other files to Dropbox. (was using idisk but since it is going away I switch to Dropbox for now).

All my pcitures and home movies are on MM for now, but are being migrated to Photobucket, so they will live on PhotoBucket and my MBP and the disk image.

I have ANOTHER NAS drive that I keep all my media on, photos, iTunes library, home movies, etc, this NAS is currently backed up to idisk once a week too, but I need to find another home for the back ups.

I have a lot of redudency but it is a bit sloppy at the moment, I am working to clean it up. But you get the gist of my direction, I keep imoprtant items in several places, both physically available to me and in the cloud.
 
Some good suggestions! Thanks!
Is there a program that will do backup of your storage in a more productive way rather than just copy all over again? I mean if I added just 10 pictures and two cd's for example, I still need to copy the whole thing to back it up (unless I remember exactly what I recently added to my storage, which is unlikely). Is there a program that will find only the recently added files and copy only them, rather than copying the whole thing again? Once storage get's bigger it gets very time consuming to backup the data over and over...
 
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