I have a Mac mini (M1), 500GB with 2 user accounts. I am thinking I want to have my 4TB SSD act with 1 partition as a time machine backup to the mini, and 2nd partition act as the home of my photo and itunes library. I have another 5TB HDD that I would like to use as my redundant backup to the 4TB SSD. (I recently had a data loss issue and am now backup crazy) Does this setup make sense? And how do i go about setting it up properly? TIA.
-Danton
What you propose is doable, but not necessarily considered a "best data management practice".
Best practice would be to dedicate an entire drive to Time Machine backups. Don't share the drive with any other volumes or data. Given that your mini has a 500GB drive, an appropriately sized TM backup drive would be ~1.5TB or 2-3 times the capacity of the drive(s) being backed up. Your 4TB drive is much more capacious than necessary, so I understand your two partition plan.
The best backup strategy is 3-2-1.
3 data copies
2 copy types (Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner, for example)
1 copy kept offsite.
As for the set up, start with an external drive formatted for use using the GUID partition map and the APFS format.
You'll find the guidance you need here:
Please see: Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support
Also: Backup disks you can use with Time Machine - Apple Support
What you propose is doable, but not necessarily considered a "best data management practice".
Best practice would be to dedicate an entire drive to Time Machine backups. Don't share the drive with any other volumes or data. Given that your mini has a 500GB drive, an appropriately sized TM backup drive would be ~1.5TB or 2-3 times the capacity of the drive(s) being backed up. Your 4TB drive is much more capacious than necessary, so I understand your two partition plan.
The best backup strategy is 3-2-1.
3 data copies
2 copy types (Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner, for example)
1 copy kept offsite.
As for the set up, start with an external drive formatted for use using the GUID partition map and the APFS format.
You'll find the guidance you need here:
Please see: Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support
Also: Backup disks you can use with Time Machine - Apple Support
+1
It's not a good idea to have Time Machine and your user libraries on the same external drive.
Use one external drive for your user libraries and over flow.
Use a second external drive for Time Machine to backup the Mac mini and your user library drive.
Use a third external drive for redundant backups. Use clone-ware like CarbonCopyCloner to make a second backup your user library drive.
I really don't want to buy another hard drive, lol. The day to day use of Mac mini is not storage intensive. the majority of the space is taken up by photos.
Now I am thinking I use the 4TB SSD as basically an extension of the Mac 500GB. And then use the 5TB as a clone of that?
Best Data Management practices?
