How do Pros manage backup?

3rd party APPS? 😕

Carbon Copy Cloner is recommended on the Apple forums likely more often than all other APPS combined. 😊

OK, wireless.

Aha. I did not know you had so many disks. That could be a lot of storage. How large is each drive, how much space is used on each, and how large are your TIme Machine backup disks? Let's see if your USED storage fits on the Time Machine backup disks.

For each disk volume click on its volume icon then type Command-I to see how much data is in use.

Yes. We are assuming Time Machine as the only backup software. You have been clear on that.

Sorry I was not clear on backing up your photo library. Time Machine will backup all of your external drives, unless you exclude one or more of them. So it will backup your external library. It will just do it.

Let't go back to counting what you want to backup and what you consider temporary storage that you can afford to lose.

You are clear you want to backup your internal SSD and your photo library disk. If the other disk with movies and TV shows do not need to be backed up (if you can afford to lose them) then you do not need a huge Time Machine disk. How large do you expect your photo library to grow to? Add that size to your 128 GB SSD, multiple by 1.2 and then that is the size of the backup disks you need. Will that fit on 1 TB disks? If not you need 2 or 3 TB backup disks. (4 TB disks are not yet reliable enough.) Hopefully you will have a lot more space than 20% extra, but that small amount of headroom will do.

So if you have temporary data on an external disks, just tell Time Machine not to backup those disks.

Yes. You can attach multiple drives to any generation of Time Capsules via a powered USB hub.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2421

If you do that you can use one of the external drives as your second backup drive. It might as well be a 3 TB drive. This will allow you to backup your internal SSD, your external photo library, and other disks you wish to include in the backup, as long as the total disk USED to be backed up does not exceed about 2.4 TB.

Again, what are the sizes of the USED space on your external hard drives?

AceNeerav wrote:

How do u manage backup?

I've never used Time Machine - for me, it's overkill.

Instead, I make a complete bootable clone of my hard drive every day, and sometimes more frequently than every day, with Carbon Copy Cloner, to an external hard drive.

Additionally, once a week I make another clone, to another external drive.

Tom,

Yes. CCC is a great option for backing up drives and that has been discussed in this thread but it requires more effort than Time Machine. AceNeerav is clear he wants the automated simplicty of Time Machine.

TM backups are not as reliable as cloning. I'd only use TM as a secondary backup. The simplicity of CCC or SuperDuper is almost equal to TM.

I agree, mostly. Time Machine is plug and play to backup multiple disks. CCC requires one to schedule backups or do them manually and to have one cloned disk for ever disk in use. It requires you to purchase a 3rd party appllication. CCC does not maintain hourly snapsots and is not available from online when you need to restore from a snapsot. All of these are only minor points and I too find CCC to be easy to use.

Effort to use CCC? If it required effort I wouldn't do it!

I'm kind of a lazy guy but even I can just about manage the "effort" required to use CCC:

1. Insert USB plug into USB socket.

2. One click to start up CCC.

3. One click to select the main drive.

4. One click to select the target drive.

5. Type in user password.

6. Go and lie down in a darkened room for about 10 minutes while CCC clones my drive.

Oh boy - I'm exhausted....