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osxabsd

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 28, 2009
41
0
Do you Mac Pro owners out there have a second internal harddrive used for Time Machine? (Presumably this is possible.) Obviously, an external harddrive has the advantage that one can take offsite for storage.
 
Do you Mac Pro owners out there have a second internal harddrive used for Time Machine? (Presumably this is possible.) Obviously, an external harddrive has the advantage that one can take offsite for storage.

Yup.
 
personally i'd rather make a raid 0 and have two bootable disks should one fail, this also increases read speeds a lot.
 
I ment RAID 1, my mistake :p

RAID 1 is NOT a backup. It protects you against a drive failure but it does not protect you against human errors. If you delete a file, it will be deleted from both drives and will be gone for good. Backups don't work this way, the deleted file will remain in the backup drive even if you deleted it from the main drive. Also, you can use e.g. CCC to create bootable backups.
 
Since I don't need a lot of storage in my MP, I have a boot SSD in bay 1 and a Time Machine drive in bay 2. I have an external FW800 enclosure with another HDD which I use for a quarterly clone using Carbon Copy Cloner.

This FW800 lives in the house but in a different room. This way I am protected if a burglar strikes or I get a catastrophic failure of the MP but not so much if there is a fire.
 
I have a drive in my MP that is a Time Machine drive. I have two more internal hard drives for data, and the 4th internal hard drive for a boot drive.

I also have an external hard drive that is also configured as a Time Machine drive that is my off-site backup strategy. I keep the external HD at my work. Once a month, I bring the external HD from my office to home, plug it in, change my Time Machine disc to point to the external HD, let it back up, then change the Time Machine disc back to the internal TM drive, then bring the external HD back to my office. This way, in case of theft/fire, I still have my offsite backup at work (unless something befalls me the one day per month that I bring the external HD home).

Just make sure that you have not partitioned your internal hard drive that you use for Time Machine, because it won't do you any good to have that data backed up if the same drive backing it up fails.

My MP is for home use, btw, not for work, so for me my backup need is to preserving data, not necessarily maintaining uptime.
 
Yes it works well. Not ideal for your only backup solution but a nice addition. I use cloud backup for all my media files and use time machine to capture what i'm working on day to day. Acts like a repository so if i completely mess something up I can always recover.
 
In summary, I am going to get an internal drive for time machine backups, and an external drive for system images using Carbon copy of Super Duper. The external drive will be stored offsite.

Any recommendations for the above items.
 
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