Best external storage for everything

. To add to Ron’s excellent advice, you should be using two external dives. One to hold your Libraries and one to backup both the Libraries and the Mac mini.

You dodged the bullet this time with that external drive. Just think about what could have happened, if it had failed with no backup on a second external drive.

If you are not into using Time Machine to backup everything, CarbonCopyCloner and SuperDuper clones are great options.

Most everyone has their favorite brands. I too use and like LaCie drives. I do think it's time to get a new drive as yours is a bit old and will eventually fail. you can always check the reviews for various drive brands.

i would add that i long ago stopped using Time Machine and changed to Carbon Copy Cloner, which seems to never have any problems, unlike Time Machine. Also, it has some additional important features not found in Time Machine. Last, it keeps a current duplicate copy of your finder which makes it easy to find a file or app, unlike T.M.

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I was using CarbonCopyCloner a year or two before ™ came out in OS X. These days I keep a ™ drive connected to our Mac’s, but you can not beat a CarbonCopyCloner clone on an external SSD for Restoring or Migrating to a new Mac.

I also use CCC to backup my system and also do backups of my external drives. Like @den.thed, I have been using it since version 1.0 and has worked as expected. The advantage of cloning the devices is that it is a mirror of the source and is easily searchable with Spotlight.

I do however still use Time Machine. It's prime use however is to recover from "event issues" such as a bad app update, returning a current project to to a previous state say a few hours ago or a file, and for brain fog issues of deleting a file I may have been working on in which case I can at least get it back to what I had at most an hour ago.

Is there more than one partition on the old external drive..?

Did you make separate partition’s on the new drive for each of the CCC backups, one for the iMac and one for each of the other external drive(s)…?

No that is fine. Only problem is keeping track.

If one copy job seem to be missing something, check the CCC settings and re- run it.

Once you have mastered and like CCC. You should buy it, so that way you can update the existing backups, instead of having to creating a new full backup each time.

I've used LaCie, Samsung, Crucial in a USB box and several others I can't remember right now. All are good, non are perfect and most will work just fine for you.