Need a little guidance to figure out how to back up my data. I was thinking of using one external hard drive to store all of my photos, videos, and music. Then I would have a second external hard drive that would back up both the Mac Mini and the first hard drive. What is the best way to do this? Or is there a better set up?
I do not need hourly backups, so I do not use Time Machine. I also do not use or like Internet based backup systems. I run a daily clone backup on one drive and a weekly clone on a second using CarbonCopyCloner and have for years. I also copy my photos, home videos and music to an MS-DOS FAT-32 formatted drive, so that I can easily share those with family members that use PCs.
For some good backup ideas, see > The no-worry backup plan | Macworld
For a more updated take on backup, see > My backup plan: Dan Frakes | Macworld
I have two external drives connected to my Mini.
A2Tb for "storage", where I keep all my installers, VMs, documents, videos, website files and music.
A 1Tb Time Machine to keep my internal HD backed up.
I run them on the USB3 bus, with a "dual dock" which houses both.
I don't use the 1Tb to back up the 2Tb for obvious reasons.
I have always used a Time Machine that was twice the size of the drive it was backing up. My Mini is 500Gb, so a 1Tb is the TM.
I also have a 500Gb which I connect every six months to update my installers' backup. (Don't want to have to get all that software (115Gb) over again.)
IMHO the easiest and surest way of backing up your system is Time Machine. You need an external drive that is at least two to three times the size of the drive(s) you will be backing up. Time Machine will include multiple drives on the same machine in a single backup set and can discretely backup several Macs to the same Time Machine drive without partitioning the designated TM drive. Each machine will be backed up to its own sparse disk bundle to maintain the segregation between backup sets. The TM drive can be connected by Firewire, eSATA, USB 2 or 3 (USB 1 will work but it is dreadfully slow), or over the Local Area Network. Setup takes seconds to accomplish and the results are reliable.
I have a 2TB Hitachi drive in a NewerTechnology MiniMax enclosure connected though the USB 3 port to my Mac mini where I store music and photos that were overcrowding my 1.1TB internal fusion drive. All of this is Time Machine backed up to a 3TB Time Capsule via an 802.11n WiFi network. For archival data and applications storage I have an industrial grade 750GB Hitachi drive in an OWC enclosure configured as a data drive on an old Mac mini running Mavericks and OS X Server 3.
Using 2 external hard drives with Mac Mini?
