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Q: Time Machine independent external hard drive backup

Can I backup two external hard drives independently to two separate backup drives?

 

2TB EHD backed up to a 2TB EHD

and

5TB EHD backed up to a 5TB EHD

 

The 2TB drive holds content inventory that changes frequently but never amounts to more than 300GB.

 

The 5TB drive holds archived files that adds with about 30 GB of data once a month.

iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013), iOS 10

Posted on Sep 14, 2016 6:12 AM

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Q: Time Machine independent external hard drive backup

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  • by John Lockwood,Solvedanswer

    John Lockwood John Lockwood Sep 14, 2016 8:12 AM in response to gunzablazin
    Level 6 (9,314 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    Sep 14, 2016 8:12 AM in response to gunzablazin

    Time Machine is not really suited to this. The only way I can see it could do this would be to setup one drive to be excluded from the backup, then do the respective Time Machine backup. Then reverse the exclusion so the opposite drive is excluded, then backup to the opposite Time Machine backup.

     

    This as should be clear would be a completely manual process, in fact you realistically would have to turn off Time Machine to prevent it auto backing up to the wrong drive between manual backups.

     

    However other more sophisticated backup programs could be setup to do this automatically.