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Hey, maybe a stupid question, but doing what we do, is there any reason for me to dedicate an external HD just for Time Machine? Just wondering if it is even worth my TB space?

thanks,

scooter

scooter wrote:Hey, maybe a stupid question, but doing what we do, is there any reason for me to dedicate an external HD just for Time Machine? Just wondering if it is even worth my TB space?

OMG! Of course there is!
I can think of a million reasons to have not only one, but TWO dedicated TM drives. Don't share them for anything else. Keep one onsite and one offsite. Then rotate them every week.
These backups should copy the system drive and whatever DP drives you use.

Regardless of how many TM volumes you have, I don't know why you need to dedicate any of them to TM. I have a 3T external USB volume used by TM for my main audio Mac. But I also back up other things to it, like downloads of audio app and plugin updates, temp backups of working project, dumps of image files from cameras awaiting further attention, etc. I don't rely on TM to back these up because they might not be in places being backed up long enough. The backup volume in question has several years of TM backups and having other stuff on the volume has not been an issue.

I also have Time Capsule for TM backups of four other Macs, but I also keep folders of documents that I might want to access from any of the those 4 Macs. Again, this has been running for a couple of year with no problems.

One reason to have dedicated volume is to put off the day when TM decides the volume is full and starts deleting some of the older versions of your files. Another is if you send your backups off site -- then you probably don't want to send your other stuff off site with it.

Hell yes. Have more than one and keep one in a hidden location. They should be large enough so that it’s a few years before older data drops off. If you really think you’ll need a 4 year old version of a data file, back it up to something else also. Time Machine should be “set it and forget it”.

Old drives go bad over time. When they do, replace them.

It is possible to restore individual apps and data files. I do that on occasion. I have occasionally screwed things up so badly that a complete TM Restore was the only proper action. And then again, drives go bad or you upgrade to larger faster storage. Things happen.

My backup strategy:

SSD Project Drive >
>Two identical "End-Of-Each-Day" Project Backup internal Hard Drives
>Two rotating external Time Machine Hard Drives, constant backups until nearly full, then stored and replaced with new drives. Time machine backs up SSD Project Drive and my System Drive.

Plus one large internal drive with archived project and misc. data, allowing quick access to old work.

And what Mike said.

bayswater wrote:Regardless of how many TM volumes you have, I don't know why you need to dedicate any of them to TM. I have a 3T external USB volume used by TM for my main audio Mac. But I also back up other things to it, like downloads of audio app and plugin updates, temp backups of working project, dumps of image files from cameras awaiting further attention, etc. I don't rely on TM to back these up because they might not be in places being backed up long enough. The backup volume in question has several years of TM backups and having other stuff on the volume has not been an issue.

^ Word for word what Bays said.

Thanks for the replies. I guess TM confuses me in that exactly what is being backed up?

scooter

scooter wrote:Thanks for the replies. I guess TM confuses me in that exactly what is being backed up?

scooter

Look at TM options. Basically, TM backs up everything on your computer EXCEPT the items you exclude in Options, which can be anything from entire drives to individual files.

I don't think it will back up files you put on the backup volume.

TS is GREAT for "oh crap I deleted (or messed up) that file that was perfect as of last week!

It is NOT a good primary backup. Take it from me - busy trying to restore everything after catastrophic disk drive loss. TS is a work changes log and as such it rocks.

You also need periodic FULL backups. I use something called ARQ to Amazon S3 to keep that up to date. It works great. Well worth the money.

If restore time isn't important, you can back up to Amazon Glacier instead but realize it can take a full day to get something back from Glacier. It is, however, SUPER cheap.

bayswater wrote:I don't think it will back up files you put on the backup volume.

That makes sense.

HCMarkus wrote:

bayswater wrote:I don't think it will back up files you put on the backup volume.

That makes sense.

Well, someone above said that they used their back up drive to also put other files on. So it’s worthy of note that those other files will not be backed up. Of course, they will be on that back up drive… It’s just that if the back up drive fails, you’ve lost those files permanently unless there’s another copy somewhere else. Which is a very complicated way of saying, you may as well just put all of your files on your principal drives and only put back up files on your back up drives.

RodneySauer wrote:Which is a very complicated way of saying, you may as well just put all of your files on your principal drives and only put back up files on your back up drives.

That's fine for those who have unlimited space on principal and backup drives. I don't. I do have a load of very large libraries of images, sounds, etc, that are very stable, sit on other external drives, and don't need constant backing up. So copying them once to the volume that contains the TM backups, rather than having them polled several times a day makes sense to me.

bayswater wrote:

RodneySauer wrote:Which is a very complicated way of saying, you may as well just put all of your files on your principal drives and only put back up files on your back up drives.

That's fine for those who have unlimited space on principal and backup drives. I don't. I do have a load of very large libraries of images, sounds, etc, that are very stable, sit on other external drives, and don't need constant backing up. So copying them once to the volume that contains the TM backups, rather than having them polled several times a day makes sense to me.

I don't see how that uses any more or less data space. And it sounds like it would make it more complicated to restore a backup if you need to. But whatever works for you is fine, of course, if it works for you.

I have a similar situation with video files that I don't really need to backup because I can regenerate them, but I leave them off the backup drive entirely so that I don't actually use up that extra space.

RodneySauer wrote:I don't see how that uses any more or less data space. And it sounds like it would make it more complicated to restore a backup if you need to. But whatever works for you is fine, of course, if it works for you.

Not less across all the volumes, but a lot less on the "principal" volume. Mine is only 1G and a PITA to upgrade.

RodneySauer wrote: I have a similar situation with video files that I don't really need to backup because I can regenerate them, but I leave them off the backup drive entirely so that I don't actually use up that extra space.

That's my approach. I don't have backups of things I can easily regenerate or download.