Mirroring usb hard drives when connected to time capsule

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Mirroring usb hard drives when connected to time capsule

Hello,

I have just set up an airport time capsule having just moved over from Windows to mac. In my previous set up, I used 2 external usb hard drives as file repositories (photographs mainly). One disk was a back up of the other in the event of disk failure. I have re formatted one of the drives to HFS and successfully connected it to the usb on the time capsule. This seems to have worked as I can access the files on the Mac (via lightroom).

Question is, what is the easiest way to connect the other drive to the time capsule and have them (the drives) mirror each other, so that there are two copies of the data in the event of disk failure? Is this possible with 2 external usb drives, or is it something that is better done using a NAS (raid 1?).

Thank you.

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014), OS X Yosemite (10.10.3), VM Ware, performance, windows

Posted on May 4, 2015 5:22 AM

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Answer 1

May 4, 2015 11:27 AM in response to Peter80w

what is the easiest way to connect the other drive to the time capsule

Since the Time Capsule has only one USB port, the only way to connect more than one drive would be to use a powered USB hub. Common hubs allow up to 4 hard drives to connect, but larger varieties are available as well.

If you connected both drives....formatted HFS....to the hub, you could use a commercial application like Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, or ChronoSync to automatically copy one drive to the other on an hourly, daily, etc schedule that you select.

The very first copy would make a complete version of the original drive, so that may take some time depending on how much data is on the drive.

Subsequent copies will only update to reflect any changes that have been made on the original drive since the last backup, so these incremental backups should only take a few minutes in most cases.

A Raid array would do the same thing, and in most cases, would be the method of choice if the budget allows.

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Answer 2

May 4, 2015 1:49 PM in response to Peter80w

The USB on the TC is only 2.0 and fairly slow over the network.. to read and write a drive especially over wireless network will take a very long time.

It is well worth considering other options. A proper NAS for instance is not that expensive now.. even a single disk introductory type model.. as they have backup built into them.. backup is more useful than mirror (protects against disk failure) as it protects against accidental deletions, and allows multiple backups offsite.

Running multiple disks on the TC has not been very successful.

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