now let's i want to have simultaneous access to all the videos on a single drive. what is the best way to accomplish this: once a bigger internal drive is installed, can the two libraries be merged, etc.? Thanks in advance.
iPad (3rd gen) Wi-Fi, iOS 6
Hopefully, this is not something you are asking about after-the-fact. Time Machine is not an archival backup solution. If you delete stuff from your hard drive, it will eventually be deleted from your Time Machine backups. Do not make the mistake of thinking of your Time Machine backups as supplemental storage!
If you have already done this and need to restore them, see:
If you have Aperture 3.3 or later and iPhoto 9.3 or later you can merge libraries with Aperture.
Otherwise the only way to merge Libraries is with the paid ($20) version of iPhoto Library Manager
thanks. isn't it true though that if the backup drive is large enough that there wouldn't ever be a loss of data? or am i wrong to think this?
Eventually, there will come a time when old backups are removed for new ones. There will come a time that photos deleted a early on will not be in any backup in Time Machine if enough time has passed. It just depends on how much time has passed since the photos were deleted.
I keep a copy of all photos imported into iPhoto on a second external HD as a permanent backup. And that EHD is backed up by Time Machine on yet another EHD. Redundancy is the name of the game.
OT
isn't it true though that if the backup drive is large enough that there wouldn't ever be a loss of data?
If the backup drive never fills up, then Time Machine will never remove older files from it. However, the way Time Machine works, the drive will eventually fill up. Don't make the mistake of thinking that you will catch it before that happens. That's a dangerous assumption to make. And even if you decide to make that assumption, any files deleted from the hard drive and stored only in the Time Machine backup are not backed up anywhere else. If something were to happen to the backup drive (fire, theft, drive failure, etc), those files would be irrevocably gone.
If your iPhoto library has grown too large to fit on the internal hard drive, the only reasonable solution is to get an external hard drive or larger internal hard drive and store your library there. (And keep that data backed up somewhere, even if that requires also buying a larger backup drive.)
i was sort of starting to realize that i might have to buy another exernal drive. can i use time machine to back up to two drives and have them mirror each other?
also, would the best way to back up all photos and videos together be to drop the files onto a new external drive, rather than copy the iphoto library? and if i do so, do these files become available to iphoto and imovie when the drive is plugged in?
i know the memory on the new mac pros is fixed at purchase. someone told me that the internal drive is too, but i am not sure about that. do you know?
do you just drop individual files onto the EHD? or do you back up the iphoto library itself. i guess you copy the files outside of the iphoto library. or is that correct?
if iphoto is backed up by time machine, and then iphotos are deleted off the mac to make space for new video, how are those two iphoto libraries handled. the disk would be too full for a merged set to restore on the mac.
