Davethehiker Loc: South West Pennsylvania

I keep all my image files on 3TB LaCie hard drive attached with Velcro to the lid of my Mac Book Pro. It's no where near filled but I like to keep a lot of head room. Both the internal 1TB HD in my computer and the external Velcroed HDs are automatically and wirelessly backed up over my LAN. It's been working for years.

Recently, somehow the data on my AirPort Time Capsule became corrupted and the backup process was going on continuously. I contacted Apple support and was told to erase the Backup data on my AirPort time capsule and do a fresh backup. This worked doing this wirelessly over my LAN took about 13 hours. I worried about what if one of my other HDs happen to fail now? I decided it was time to get redundant backup drives.

I ordered a 5 TB LaCie HD that plugged directly into my computer. This will be my secondary back up HD. I contacted Apple support and asked what is a good way to do this? He explained that "Time Machine" can make multiple backups to different HDs. It does not care if it's over a LAN or hard wired via a cable. He showed me how to add the second HD to Time Machine and tell it to back up to both. Time Machine quickly made the incremental back up to me existing backup in a few minutes. It then switched over to the hard wired HD and started to make my secondary HD. It's been running for about an hour. It's estimating that it will be done in in about 5 more hours. I know from past experience that it will backup much faster than it first estimates. I suspect it will done before I go to bed tonight.

This is sooo cool!

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Given that they’re LaCie packaged (probably Seagate) HDs, a second backup is an excellent idea!

Kmgw9v Loc: Miami, Florida

Good to know. Thanks for posting.

Davethehiker Loc: South West Pennsylvania

You are welcome. It's a nice clean easy way. I thought it was going to br more complex.

a6k Loc: Detroit & Sanibel

Just a clarification: if it has two "target" drives it will alternate, using one or the other per hour but, thus, every two hours for an individual drive.

Davethehiker Loc: South West Pennsylvania

I don't understand what you said. Maybe that's the way it works for you but not on my computer. My computer took a few minutes to backup the few new things to the AirPort Time Capsule, then it turned it's attention to the empty new 5 TB HD and has been backing up continually since 5:27 p.m. That's five hours on one drive. It's still going on as I type this. I don't see the switching back and forth you mention? It says it will be done in 1 more hour.

Bipod

I'm glad you found something that's that easy to use. I use a Seagate GoFlex external hard drive to back up my
Windows laptop. But backing up means you've got to worry about restores and possibly losing recent changes.

There is an even better option: writing simultaneously to multiple disks. To be absolutely safe, you would still need
an off-site backup, but chances are you would never need to restore from it.

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) controllers have been around on PCs since the late 1980s.
Many SCSI ones were made by Seagate. RAID controllers have been common in enterprise class systems
for decades.

Finally, a good journaling filesystem is a big help in maintain file integrity. Basically, it keeps a list of all
the data and/or metadata it needs to write, so if the system locks up or the power goes out, it can resume
right where it left off. These days nearly every OS has one, but they are not all created equal.

The first journaling file system was IBM JFS under AIX UNIX. The highly regarded Veritas VxFS (called JFS
on HP/UX) became avialable on PCs under UNIX in the 1990s. Microsoft's first journaling file system, ntfs, was
released in 1993. Apple's first journaling file system, HFS+, was introduced in 1998. It only journals meta-data
(changes to directory entries and so forth), whereas VxFS journals *all* writes--including actual file data.

Systems using the VxFS file system do not need to be shut down--you can just snap off the power and not
corrput any files. (But I shut my UNIX PC down anyway, just to be on the safe side.).

Enterprise companies like IBM, HP Enterprise, Sun Microsystems take data integrity seriously. Consumer-oriented
companies--well, let's just say it's not prioirty #1.

The reason, of course, is that consumers don't realize that data loss from locks-ups, power-outs or disk crashes is
entirely preventable, and should never happen on a well-designed system.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I will just add that while Sun Microsystems has been absorbed by Oracle, their excellent Solaris OS and ZFS file system (a copy-on-write FS) lives on, at least for the present.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

Yes. You can also keep one offsite and swap them every now and then. I do that with my work computer I have a TM encrypted backup volume at, home and another one at work. When I am working at home I backup to the home backup volume and at work to the office backup volume. Both backup volumes are encrypted, as is the computer.

Davethehiker Loc: South West Pennsylvania

It finally completed do the backup to the new 5 TB HD at 10:37 p.m. That's a little over 5 hours to back up 1.25 TB of data. Both my 3 TB LaCie HD where I keep all my LightRoom Images and the new 5 TB LaCie HD that I use for secondary backup for everything are hot to the touch. My computer that is supplying the power to both HDs did not get hot, but it has an internal fan. My Apple computer is an older model that has two "Thunder Bolt" ports on the side. Both of the LaCie HDs were plugged into those ports.

Everything worked as expected.

Davethehiker Loc: South West Pennsylvania

I'm surprised by how well Time Machine handles my two back up drives. Late last night I removed my new 5 TB HD than now contained a complete backup. A little later I decided to update some of the free tools that Apple provides. i.e. Pages, Number, and Keynote. Shortly there after Time Machine decided it was time to make another incremental backup to the only HD drive available to it, the AirPort module.

This morning I decided to see what would happen if I plugged the 5 TB back in. I then instructed Time Machine to "Back Up Now." It went directly to the 5 TB HD and did an incremental taking just a few minutes.

This is easy!