Timemachine too small for my needs - can i have two different time machines?

[estherau]

I have an 8 bay orico with 8x6TB HDs. They are in raid 5. I am running out of space and only backing up a few days. Should I get bigger drives, or set my orico to raid zero, or do you think i should get a second eg orico for a second time machine. that would be cheaper because then i woulnd't need to buy a whole lot of 8TB drives which usually fail their smart test with in a week or sooner. I could get smaller cheaper drives.
but i don't know if that is possible to have two different time machines backing up different external attached drives at the same time.

 

[chrfr]

I have an 8 bay orico with 8x6TB HDs. They are in raid 5. I am running out of space and only backing up a few days. Should I get bigger drives, or set my orico to raid zero, or do you think i should get a second eg orico for a second time machine. that would be cheaper because then i woulnd't need to buy a whole lot of 8TB drives which usually fail their smart test with in a week or sooner. I could get smaller cheaper drives.
but i don't know if that is possible to have two different time machines backing up different external attached drives at the same time.

You can add multiple disks to Time Machine but you can't set them to back up different things unless you're manually changing the exclusion list every time you back up.
If you have multiple disks set as your destination, Time Machine will cycle through them sequentially each time a backup runs. So, if a backup starts at 10:00, it'll back up to disk 1. When the backup runs at 11:00, it'll back up to disk 2, etc. If disk 2 is unavailable or disconnected at 11:00, then Time Machine will back up to disk 1.

 

[estherau]

Thanks chrfr well that is bad news for me then. ah, what a pity you can't set multiple time machines to back up different things. damn it! I'm kind of stuck then.

 

[gilby101]

Time Machine is not targeted at people with your storage needs. You could/should be looking at alternatives to Time Machine. As an example, you could look at synchronisation apps like Chronosync which can do one-way synchronisation to backup storage. Weakness (compared with Time Machine) is in the rather limited (in my view) ability to keep history. Strength is that you can configure many different synchronisation tasks. Just an example of what might suit you better than Time Machine.

 

[estherau]

Hi, well i do have crashplan already. but chronosync looks very interesting too. Thanks gilby101 - i hadn't heard of that before.