HT201250: Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac

Learn about Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac
genenapp

Q: Back up internal non boot drive in a Mac Pro 2009

I have a Mac Pro 2009 with 4 internal drives.  I keep my photo files on one of the non-boot drives and I'd like to make automatic backups from it to another internal drive.  I can do this in Terminal using rsync, but I'm wondering if there is an incremental backup program to accomplish this.  From what I've read at Apple Support, Time Machine only backs up the boot drive.

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Jul 10, 2016 8:27 AM

Close

Q: Back up internal non boot drive in a Mac Pro 2009

  • All replies
  • Helpful answers

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Jul 10, 2016 8:33 AM in response to genenapp
    Level 9 (50,202 points)
    Desktops
    Jul 10, 2016 8:33 AM in response to genenapp

    Time Machine backs up whatever it is told to, so use it. It meets your requirements.

  • by Grant Bennet-Alder,Apple recommended

    Grant Bennet-Alder Grant Bennet-Alder Jul 10, 2016 9:20 AM in response to genenapp
    Level 9 (60,677 points)
    Desktops
    Jul 10, 2016 9:20 AM in response to genenapp

    From what I've read at Apple Support, Time Machine only backs up the boot drive.

     

    That is not correct. Time Machine backs up every directly-connected drive (not Network drives) of the Mac it is running on, by default. To get the behavior you describe above, you would have to deliberately make changes to its settings.

     

    By design, Time Machine works at low priority in the background. It is intended to not interfere with your work, but to slowly and quietly get your backups up to date. Your first Backup (which will be a full backup) make take a few hours. After that, you may go to check it and find it has already done a few more incremental backups without your even noticing.

     

    Time Machine does its own old-backup pruning. When the drive is getting full, very old and redundant backups will be automatically removed. Time Machine is not an Archive program. Once you remove a file from your Mac, old copies of it will eventually (over a long period of time) disappear from the Backup set.