Question about Time Machine

[petalino]

I have multiple external USB drives, which hold my data separated by category. Each drive holds either private photos, videos or business photos. The sizes are 1 or 2 TB each


I just bought a new 5TB external backup to use just for TM and Carbon Copy backups.

A friend has suggested to me that I use TM in the following way:

Divide the 5TB backup drive into several physical partitions: each dedicated for backup of the smaller external drives mentioned above.

Start doing TM backups to these multiple external discs (partitions on the 5GB HD).

The result will be several TM backups, each storage drive having its own backup on a separate partition of the main backup Hard Drive.

Question: Can this be done at all?
Can TM handle several TM backups to different drives (partitions)?

 

[Weaselboy]

Can TM handle several TM backups to different drives (partitions)?

Not quite like you are describing... no.

By default TM excludes external drives from backup. So could attach all the externals you want to backups an remove them from the TM options section. So now have configured what you want backed up. Then TM can backup that same data set to multiple destinations. So in TM settings just add two disks or partitions as the destination, then TM will alternate each hour between the two destination disks/partitions.

But it is all or nothing in the single backup set.

There is no way to have say disk1 disk2 backup to partition A, then disk3 and disk4 to partition B. You can only do disk2, disk2, disk3, and disk4 to partitions A and B.

 

[BrianBaughn]

You'll find it easy to create and control CCC disk image backups on that 5TB drive.