Synch one external hard drive to another - iTunes media library backup question

Question

Level 1

4 points

Synch one external hard drive to another - iTunes media library backup question

Hello,

What's the best way to synch one external hard drive to another ?

My hard drive recently crashed. One expensive data recovery later, I'm setting up my iTunes media library in two different external hard drives, so as to avoid this ever happening again.

Does anyone have any ideas? I won't be keeping either hard drive plugged all the time. Ideally I'd like to back up one hard drive every month or so. Is there a nifty piece of software out there that will only back up what is newly added to the first one?

Thanks,

Noel

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Oct 4, 2015 3:56 PM

Reply

Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

272,749 points

Oct 4, 2015 4:04 PM in response to nekstrom

See Backup your iTunes for Windows library with SyncToy. The Mac utility Synkron should do what you want.

tt2

Reply

Answer 2

Oct 4, 2015 4:08 PM in response to nekstrom

Three choices that come to mind are just using Disk Utility, SuperDuper (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html), or CarbonCopyCloner 4 (https://bombich.com/) to clone your primary external to the other.

Other possibilities would also be to use the second drive as a TimeMachine backup of your system. That's the easiest by far and will include other external drives. And lastly, make sure that you have an off-site backup in case of disaster like a fire or lightning strike that might kill both of your drives at the same time. Cloud backup services like BackBlaze (https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html) is inexpensive and can give you piece of mind.

The more layers of backup you have the better.

Reply

Answer 3

Limnos

Level 10

411,211 points

Oct 4, 2015 5:19 PM in response to nekstrom

What you probably want is something which does incremental backups so you don't end up copying the whole drive each time, only things which have changed get copied or deleted. I use Carbon Copy Cloner which does this and more but I am using an old OS version and I have the free version. They recently started charging for it. I don't know if there are free utilities which do incremental backup, or if Time Machine can do it the way you need (I don't have Time Machine).

Reply