multiple drives / volumes and Time Machine restore

[adam9c1]

Hello.
I have a MP with two hard drives I backup to Time Machine.
1. 128GB SSD for OS, Apps, etc
2. 2TB WD Black for iPhoto library, iTunes library, etc

I back this up via Time Machine.

If I ever need to do a OS restore to
a. same hardware box but only with one drive
b. different machine with only one drive
c. same machine with different drives

will time machine restore be smart?
a. merge the two volumes
b. ignore the second volume
c. think all is restored but anything from second volume will not be restored?

- I have never done this and don't have a good test bed for this. I'm running Snow Leopard on this box, and have Lion on a newer Mac Pro however I'm unable to "butcher" them up to test.
- I can test this scenario with a PowerMac G5 running Leopard.

 

[propaintballa]

I know this is an old thread, but I'm interested in a similar thing...

My Time Machine backups are from my MBP which had one drive in, I've now put an SSD in and will be moving the home folder to the mechanical drive and keeping the OS and Apps on the SSD.

I'm wondering, if the backup just goes to where each folder it actually located in the new setup, or will it try to put them back in the exact same path :/

 

[ogee]

I had my iMac with 2 HD replaced and I tried to restore my TM backup. The system has 1 SSD and 1 HDD. MY user files are on the HDD and the system on the SSD. My system was backed up to a 3 TB Thunderbolt drive.

So Today I tried to restore the new system from the backup. 1st the thunderbolt drive was apparently formatted as FAT, although my MBP could read it ok as an HFS system. Eventually I managed to get that issue solved by connecting the external drive via Firewire.

However, the time machine restore would only see the SSD backup, which meant when the restore was finished my user directories were not available and I could not log in. Lucky for me in that backup the root account is enabled. However, a normal restore over time machine resulted in the HDD having not enough space, despite being empty.

I still can not get my system restored.