Thinking of moving to iMac from PC, got a few questions
I'm thinking of moving to an iMac for my next computer, probably in the next 6 months or so, but I have a few questions I wondered if you might be able to help me with.
I'm planning on getting Parrallels Desktop and installing Windows. Now I know Time Machine takes backups every hour. But I was wondering if it will also backup not only the Mac side but the Windows side too.
For example, if I install a program on the Mac side, edit a file, delete a file etc, Time Machine will backup the changes on its next backup. If I done the same while running Windows, i.e install a program on the Windows side, edit a file, delete a file etc, does Time Machine backup these changes for the Windows side too.
Presently for my backing up purposes. I have a hard drive caddie which has a esata connection as well as a USB connection. I have a 3.5 inch 1 TB sata drive that slides in and out of my caddie by way of (for want of a better word) a cradle. I'm planning on getting a 3.5 inch 2 TB sata drive and an additional cradle so that I can have a large collection of backups.
Now with the hard drive caddie I've mentioned above, to use it on an iMac, I would only be able to connect it via USB. My fear with this is that it will be a lot slower at taking backups to what I am currently used to seeing when I have it connected to my PC via esata.
I thought about this and noticed the LaCie eSATA Hub Thunderbolt Series on the Apple website http://store.apple.com/uk/product/H8875ZM/A/lacie-esata-hub-thunderbolt-series?f node=5f&fs=m.tsConnections%3Desata
From what I can gather, it would allow me to connect my current esata caddie up to it and it would increase the performance of it to Thunderbolt performance and also would allow me to make use of my current hard drive in the process. I was wondering if anyone has used this hub and if so, is the performance significantly improved. I thought that Thunderbolt would be a good and extremely fast way of taking backups. I will point out that I find that the taking backups every hour with Time Machine, for me would be a bit of an overkill, so I'm planning on just switching Time Machine off when I don't need it to take backups, and then switching it back on when I want it to take a backup. Doing this could result in larger backups than if I had it doing it hourly, so again I thought something that would give me Thunderbolt performance would be good for this scenario.
Any help and advice would be appreciated. 🙂
Windows Vista, iPad (3rd Gen) 32GB iPhone 4S 32GB