One Macintosh HD > Two Time Machine Backups

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One Macintosh HD > Two Time Machine Backups

Is it possible to backup one Mac HD using two Time Machine backups to two separate external drives.

The reason I ask is I recently needed to revert back to Mohave from Monterey. In my first attempt, I tried restoring using my CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner)bootable backup. In Recovery Mode, The system would not let me use the CCC Clone so I ended up restoring from TM.

In the new CCC V6, Bootable backups are not recommended. Instead, they've gone to a more TM like system where you can restore files from snapshots or I assume a whole user folder if needed.

At this point TM vs CCC, I'd rather have two TM backups on separate drives.

Is it Possible??

Posted on Dec 12, 2021 5:56 AM

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Answer 1

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Alancito

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Dec 12, 2021 6:27 AM in response to Joe Gramm

Joe ~ Yes, it's possible. I've been using two separate external drives for TM backups for years – usually manually backing up to one drive daily and manually backing up to the other drive on Wednesdays. I'm still on Catalina, but presumably it's the same for Monterey:

• In Sys Prefs > TM > Click on Select Disk…

• In Sys Prefs > TM > Click on disk icon > Use Disk > Use Both.

By the way, SuperDuper! produces fully bootable backups.

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Answer 2

Joe Gramm Author

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Dec 12, 2021 8:20 AM in response to Alancito

Thanks for the reply. Yes it does look like it will work. I can confirm using your path it works the same in Monterey. It looks like TM will do auto updating on both disks. May I ask why you back up manually.

CCC will do a bootable backup as well, but you need to use legacy versions prior to V6. According to CCC, Apple now does not allow some machines, some OS to restore from a clone. I think I found that out the hard way.

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Answer 3

Alancito

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27,466 points

Dec 12, 2021 9:17 AM in response to Joe Gramm

Joe Gramm wrote: "May I ask why you back up manually."

Basically, I prefer to control when my daily TM backups run (usually first thing of the day.) That way, if something bad happens later in the day, I'll already know when the last good backup ran and what point to recover from.

Also, as I prefer to not have my drives permanently plugged in, when I do plug them in for a TM backup, I can wait for the system to completely finish accessing them before starting the backup manually. (Not necessary I know, but I like to think it helps the backup run smoother.)

Yes, doing one daily TM backup means I miss out on having every saved change I make recoverable, but I don't need that level of granularity.

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Answer 4

Joe Gramm Author

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Dec 12, 2021 9:34 AM in response to Alancito

What do you think of having 2 TM backups vs 1 TM & 1 CCC or SupreDuper. My theory on the two TM is I would still have 2 backups because they are on separate drives and I would surely be able to restore from a TM backup if needed.

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Answer 5

Alancito

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Dec 12, 2021 9:58 AM in response to Joe Gramm

2 TM backups sounds okay to me, but I'd advise making them run on different schedules – perhaps on alternate days. That way, if you hit a problem trying to recover from one backup, you may not hit the same problem recovering from the other – as the internal data structure will be different. (But I'm no expert on TM or backups in general.)

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Answer 6

Joe Gramm Author

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Dec 12, 2021 10:01 AM in response to Alancito

Thanks. Even though CCC is not bootable in V6, there is one feature I like. Using the Finder, you can simply drag and drop files from one volume to the other.

Thanks for you input.

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One Macintosh HD > Two Time Machine Backups

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