Using 2 External Drives for Time Machine

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Using 2 External Drives for Time Machine

Hi,

I have been wondering if it is possible to use 2 external drives for Time Machine. I would have one desktop drive (large - 2 or 3TB) just at home and use it whenever i'm at my desk, and i'd have one portable drive (500 - 750GB) for on the go. My reason for asking is that i'm going to buy an SSD (OCZ Vertex 2 240GB) and i'm not sure whether to trust it as i've read mixed opinions of it being the best thing you could possibly have for your mac to failing within hours of use. I just want to be backed up incase anything should go wrong.

Thanks in advance for your help

mr meister

Macbook Pro (late 2008), Mac OS X (10.6.7), 2.66GHz, 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD

Posted on Jun 25, 2011 9:28 AM

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Answer 1

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Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Jun 25, 2011 4:44 PM in response to mr meister

Yes, you can alternate drives. You do have to tell Time Machine each time you want to swap them, by selecting the new disk via Time Machine Preferences.

After the first, full backup to each, subsequent backups will only copy what's new or changed since the last backup to that particular disk. Thus the first backup after a long time between swaps will take longer, perhaps considerably longer, but Time Machine will "catch up" with all the changes.

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Answer 2

mr meister Author

Level 1

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Jun 26, 2011 1:33 AM in response to Pondini

Thank you, I thought i'd have to do this but I was wondering if there was a quicker way. No bother, it shouldn't take long to select the drive each time.

Thanks again

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