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The rest can be backed up to the Time Machine drive attached to your Mac or, if you’re tired of being tethered to the past, ignored altogether. You will, for example, wish to make multiple backups of Personal and Irreplaceable data and keep a rotating off-site backup. How you backup depends a great deal on what you backup. Should a real cloud flood your Mac and its local backup solutions, you can restore your data from the ether. Using an online backup solution such as MobileMe’s iDisk, Dropbox, or one of the many commercial online backup services you can upload your most precious data to the cloud. Online backup provides a way to protect your data from those on-site disasters. Again, it’s an on-site solution so it’s threatened by the same acts of nature that can destroy your Mac. If one of the array’s hard drives takes a dive, your data is still safe, as it’s backed up on another of the device’s drives.
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Thanks to Data Robotics’ Drobo and similar simplified RAID arrays, such boxes are now finding their way into home offices. RAID arrays-boxes that contain multiple hard drives packed with redundant data-were once the purview of corporations and well-heeled geeks. Detailed at length in the linked article, you can use a variety of software tools to automate the backup of multiple Macs over a network to a hard drive attached to the server. If you live in a home with multiple Macs consider turning one of those Macs into a backup server. Like the single hard drive solution, it means your backup drive is on-site. If you have multiple Macs to back up, Apple has a solution in the form of its 1TB and 2TB Time Capsule wireless hard drive/routers (priced at $299 and $499 respectively). If the worst happens, you lose, at most, a single week’s work. Detach it on Sunday and swap in Drive B, allowing it to back up the Mac during the next week. (If you have to store it on-site, get a waterproof fire-safe and place your second drive in it.) So, attach Drive A on Monday and let it back up your Mac throughout the week. The difference is that you rotate the drives and keep one of the drives off-site-in a bank’s safe deposit box, for example, or at a friend’s house.
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The idea is similar as the single back up drive. Should there be a cataclysmic event-a massive power surge, fire, flood, or earthquake-you could lose both your Mac’s hard drive and the secondary drive attached to it. The cons may not be quite so apparent to everyone. The greatest effort it takes is purchasing the drive and plugging it in. Configuring a Time Machine backup with a second hard drive is dead simple to set up. This may be the easiest way to back up your data as it requires effort no greater than purchasing and plugging in a compatible hard drive.Įxcluding system files from your backup can save you a lot of space. When you do this Time Machine offers you the option to additionally exclude all system applications and UNIX tools. So, for example, you could save some space by asking it to exclude the System folder at the root level of your startup drive. Although Time Machine doesn’t allow you to choose specific items to back up, it does let you exclude items. Just plug in a FireWire or USB drive (or add a second internal drive if your Mac allows), switch on Time Machine, and let it do its stuff. Attaching a second hard drive to your Mac is the most common way to use Time Machine.
#MAC BACKUP SOFTWARE TO MULTIPLE HARD DRIVES PRO#
For around $250 you can purchase an external Blu-ray burner and copy of Roxio’s Toast Titanium 10 Pro ( ), which allows your Mac to burn Blu-ray discs.Ī Mac with second hard drive. And Blu-ray burners have dropped in price. Although subject to the same environmental threats as CD and DVD media, they hold more data-25GB on a single-layer disc and 50GB with dual-layer media. While not natively supported by the Mac, writable Blu-ray discs are another option. In a pinch, however, it’s a reasonable part of a sneakernet solution-one where you need to easily move data from one computer to another when you don’t have a network connecting the two. It’s also a terribly slow means for backing up a lot of data. And scratch it badly enough and your data is toast. Writeable CDs and DVDs can degrade over time, particularly when exposed to sunlight and moisture. Regrettably, such claims haven’t been born out by the facts. Proponents of these discs once promised this media would survive for dozens of years. Although Apple sees writable CD and DVD media as something of a dead-end, a lot of today’s Macs still bear a SuperDrive.