Best way to back up mac and external drive to time machine?

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Level 1

29 points

Best way to back up mac and external drive to time machine?

My LaCie external Time Machine drive crashed on me somehow and I had to repartition it. I have a second back up (different external drive) through CCC so Im not worried about data loss, but for the life of me, I cant remember how I had time machine configured to back up. I have a second separate external drive that contains my iphoto, imovie and itunes libraries on it. I think I had time machine set up to back that drive up along with my mac separtely somehow, but after thinking about it, isnt that a little redundant. Am I not backing up my iphoto/imovie/itunes external drive through my mac back up? Seems like before I could go into time machine and open that drive from there. If so, is there any reason to back up the iphoto drive separately along with my mac back on time machine, or is that even possible? Would it be easier to restore the iphoto hard drive if it were backup up separately, not as a part of my mac backup? I have had my CCC back up (a second external back up drive) set up to back up the mac and the pic/video/itunes drive separately.

OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66 GHz

Posted on Dec 3, 2013 6:27 AM

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Answer 1

dwb

Level 7

32,920 points

Dec 3, 2013 8:35 AM in response to Cumby

If you open TimeMachine's preferences and click on the Options button you'll see that it works with a simple exclusion rule. It assumes it should back up everything on every drive connected to it except for those files, folders, and drives you exclude.

Like you, I have a separate external drive for media. After playing around with TimeMachine way back when I realized that each time I edited the meta data for music the song or movie got backed up again. I also discovered that at that time TM didn't play nice with iPhoto's library. Given these issues I decided to exclude my media hard drive from TimeMachine and back it up using ChronoSync (on an automatic schedule) once a week.

After some thought I decided I didn't want a simple clone because if a song or movie became corrupt I didn't want to overwrite a good song with a corrupt version. ChronoSync does archiving. When doing a backup if it finds a file has been changed it archives the old one and overwrites with the new one. I look at the logs each week to see if any archiving took place. If I didn't do any editing that week there shouldn't be.

BTW - being a belt and suspenders kind of tech, I have multiple backup drives so one TM drive and one media drive is always off site. A backup is no good if the thief steals it.

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