Does anybody know if you can duplicate or make backups of the TM sparsebundles? And if you can how does one do it?
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Time Machine duplicating the backup.
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rsync. I did not know about this. if one uses it, can rsync look inside the Sparse and copy stuff, or does the sparse needs to be mounted?
A simpler method is to have two TM volumes and let TM continue backup to both. I have one of them on a USB-connected local disk and the other TM volume on a remote NAS. This gives the result you want, two TM backups but I don't have to do anything. It is automatic.
Me too. I copy the NAS volume. But I cheat and make it simple. I have a second NAS at a different location and have it set to mirror the first NAS. Mirroring requires surprisingly low bandwidth because it only movies the changes and it is OK if it takes quite a long time.
I would not buy a second, expensive NAS for this but eventually, you upgrade and this is a good use for the old NAS.
So, let's say I move 1GB of new data from a camera to the Mac. I figure that within 2 or 3 hours, the data is copied to all the backup locations without me needing to do anything
My understanding is that duplicating TM backups is not possible, eg this thread and this article. CCC will not make a backup of a TM backup.
How would you want to use the backup of your TM backup? There are three possible uses I can think of:
1. Browse directly to retrieve individual files
2. To replace the current (presume failed) TM drive as the new active TM drive.
3. To be the source for a migration restore of the whole drive.
As with all backups they should be tested, so whichever of the three are your intended use, I suggest you try using it that way to make sure it does what you want. Good luck!
EDIT, However CCC has this article which implies you can copy the sparsebundle. But that article is for CCCv5. If you click the link for current version the new article says not, but does not mention sparsebundles at all.
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If you're just copying the sparse bundle image file itself, it should be fine as long as you run the backup when Time Machine is not actively writing to the archive. And yes, rsync would be great, if you are OK messing around in the terminal. rsync has a great algorithm for determining what is "different" in a large file and copying only the chunks that has changed. It is really intended to be used to copy a file between two different systems over the network and saving bandwidth by not transferring parts of the file that are the same. (An rsync process will be run on both systems, and they will communicate and use hashes to figure out what parts of the file are the same and what parts are different.) I use it to keep backups of files up to date on an off-site system.
It "works" for doing a local transfer (i.e. copying a file from one drive to another on the same host), but the entire file will need to be read from both the source and destination, so the "time savings" will be less (compared to just copying the whole file without worrying about what is different).
macOS has a built-in version of rsync that is quite a bit out of date; if you would like to use a current version, you can grab it via Homebrew.
It "works" for doing a local transfer (i.e. copying a file from one drive to another on the same host), but the entire file will need to be read from both the source and destination, so the "time savings" will be less (compared to just copying the whole file without worrying about what is different).
macOS has a built-in version of rsync that is quite a bit out of date; if you would like to use a current version, you can grab it via Homebrew.
good one PotentPeas. I have a look at it. Presently I am experimenting with ChronoSync to see how that works.