Backing up in the office and at home

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Backing up in the office and at home

Hello everyone,

I use Time Machine (TM) to back up my laptop when I'm in the office, but I would also like to be able to use it to back up to a different external drive when I'm at home, without having to manually change the settings each time to change Time Machine's target disk. Other discussions on this forum suggest that TM can only work with one disk (or set of raid disks), and therefore in one location (office or home, but not both). If true, this seems rather short-sighted of Apple. Any suggestions or comments?

Acton.

Macbook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8), 15" 2.4GHz 4GB RAM

Posted on Oct 7, 2009 2:40 AM

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Answer 1

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Oct 7, 2009 9:03 AM in response to Acton

Acton wrote:
Hello everyone,

I use Time Machine (TM) to back up my laptop when I'm in the office, but I would also like to be able to use it to back up to a different external drive when I'm at home, without having to manually change the settings each time to change Time Machine's target disk.

That's the only way to do it. Just use the +Change Disk+ button in TM Preferences.

TM will use only one drive at a time, and only the one you specify, to protect you. If you have multiple Macs, for example, being backed-up to various drives, and were to accidentally connect the wrong disk . . .

Or suppose you'd gotten a larger drive for backups, but kept the old one for a while. When you connect the old one to look for something there, you really don't want TM to suddenly start a new backup to that old drive.

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Answer 2

Acton Author

Level 1

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Oct 8, 2009 6:17 AM in response to Pondini

Thanks for this. I appreciate it.

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