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I see. I do currently save patches to my VI drives and update my SFXs regularly so having them on TM might be best for me - I could change that routine if I find it unwieldy once I'm TMed up.

Sorry for all the newbie Time Machine questions. Welcome to 2010, right? Here's another that the internet isn't clear on. Are TM backups drive-specific? If I turn back time on, say, my boot drive do the other drives come along?

dix wrote: Are TM backups drive-specific? If I turn back time on, say, my boot drive do the other drives come along?

You "enter" Time Machine and are presented with a dialog box of files. I believe if a directory is open you are taken to that directory but it may open to your main (default) directory. My b/u drives are off or I'd check.

Then you simply navigate to the file/folder/disk location, select what you want to restore and hit restore. You are given the option of keeping the current and the backup in the restore location (certainly not with entire disks, of course).

You can scroll thru b/u days, hours, etc. I only have the drives backing up every hour when I'm working on a score, otherwise if I'm not scoring for a few days, I'll just turn on the spinners once a week just to pick up my calendar, email, and other misc. data.

I also have "A" and "B" backups that alternate (if both drives are on) so if something happens to one TM b/u I have a redundant b/u of that. As retentive as that sounds, it has saved my ass big time in the last two years or so when I moved from a cheese grater MP to the trash can nMP. I went to migrate the cheese grater system to the new machine and the TM b/u on drive "A" was corrupted. I just switched to drive "B" and was in business in no time. In fact, I was in business much faster as I didn't have to wait for the backup of my VIs and SFX drives and I could get right back to the project I was in the middle of when the cheese grater went south.

See what I'm sayin...

It's a Finder window. Anything that is in the Finder can be brought back. It's super easy. Just do it.

I also have "A" and "B" backups that alternate

That sounds elegant and sensible MLC. Is the alternating something you set up with TM?

...yes, i will just do it! I bet a lot of my questions will be self evident.

dix wrote:

I also have "A" and "B" backups that alternate

That sounds elegant and sensible MLC. Is the alternating something you set up with TM?

...yes, i will just do it! I bet a lot of my questions will be self evident.

You can designate any drive as a Time Machine backup. Multiple drives will alternate backups, you just add them from the System Preference. Done.

And I just discovered another reason to not have static drives in the Time Machine scheme. Backing up 6tb to a USB2 drive would take about two weeks!

USB 3, OTOH, is faster than Firewire...

dix wrote:And I just discovered another reason to not have static drives in the Time Machine scheme. Backing up 6tb to a USB2 drive would take about two weeks!

Only the first time. A full restore of that much data would take only a few days.

Still, it's not recommended. eSATA through a PCIe card is the fastest on a MP tower since it overcomes the 3G internal bus limit, USB 3 also on a PCIe card should perform the same since the speed of the drive is your limiting factor. SATA on the 3G internal bus won't be much slower followed by ethernet.

I don't think ethernet is possible without a Time Capsule but there's no difference between the tower and the pancake in that regards (except that swapping disks on the low profile is easy). A drive connected to an Airport is still going through the USB 2 bottleneck.

Sorry. I though he was on a trash can with USB3 ports. On my cheese grater I'd use Firewire for that (no PCIe here). Hopefully I won't ever need the cheese grater again. I should fire it up every few months to check on it... I suppose. My G5 was in storage and I had a heck of a time restarting it. I think the drive froze, but I digress...

On my cheese grater I'd use Firewire for that (no PCIe here).

$29–$35

USB 3
https://www.amazon.com/Anker%C2%AE-Expr ... B005ARQV6U

eSATA
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet% ... ATA6PROE2/

https://www.amazon.com/MaxPower-eSATA-P ... B00B33UGIO

Thanks! Right now I have my main VI libraries on an SSD on one of those internal PCIe sata3 cards. I was thinking about swapping that out for an esata PCIe card and an enclosure. What enclosure(s) are you using?

dix wrote:Thanks! Right now I have my main VI libraries on an SSD on one of those internal PCIe sata3 cards. I was thinking about swapping that out for an esata PCIe card and an enclosure. What enclosure(s) are you using?

Use a toaster style dock. No fans, no installation, just drop the drive into the slot. The 2.5" SSD and 3.5" HHD install the same way—no adapters to fool with.

I have a pair of el cheapo USB 2 / eSATA docks and have for 6 years, now—paid $15 at Micro Center in Santa Clara before they closed. You can get USB 3 / eSATA versions. I would go to Frys in Palo Alto and buy what they have.

eSATA is not going to give you a noticeable speed boost over USB 3 where VIs are concerned but it won't cost that much to find out.

Unlike USB, eSATA is not hot swappable. You must shut down your Mac and turn the dock off to change drives and turn the dock on before powering up your computer.

Just to weigh in, I approach TM backups like MLC does... static data is simply copied to a few internal backup spinners in my cMP. Note that patch data generally goes to the VI application on the boot drive, not the VI sample data drive, so if your TM backup includes your boot drive, you'll have automatic regular updates there.

You could create a folder on a drive to add copies of SFX files as you add them to your data drives.

I use 4TB USB2 external drives (two of them, alternating on and off site) for my MT backup drives. Yes, the first backup takes quite a while, about a day in my case (I do it on a day off), but after that updates are transparent and relatively speedy. I backup boot and DP project drives, as well as one of my two internal running backup drives to TM.

I also keep my elderly parents' Mac up to date. TM has proven essential for restoring files that get accidentally deleted. TM is definitely a winner!

Thanks. Yes, I'm learning a great deal about Time Machine.

I aborted the one-backup-to-rule-them-all strategy based on the amount of time it would take - an action that taught me that excluding drives makes TM start over from zero creating a new TM document. Does adding them after you've created a backup do the same thing? ....also, is it normal for TM is report that it's backing up 2.5tb when the data on the drives being backed up is about 750gb?

Use a toaster style dock. No fans, no installation, just drop the drive into the slot. The 2.5" SSD and 3.5" HHD install the same way—no adapters to fool with.

I've had really bad luck with docks over the years. The FW800 connectivity with my current NewerTech is much slower than other fw800 externals and often fails when cloning drives. I believe my next move will be to investigate the esata and/or usb3, that it also has, via one of the cards Mike suggests. Or possibly get one those dual docking stations. Such as https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Doc ... ng+station

FWIW, OWC has the Newertech Voyager USB 2/3 dock for $30, the FW800+eSata+USB 2/3 for $69
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/NewerTe ... Drive_Dock. I've got 5 of various configurations, 2 running on an esata card in my MP


Frank Ferrucci