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Storage Solutions

Avatar Rick Churchill
If you have read another thread of mine you’ll see I have been having difficulty with backups which is now solved however my 2Tbyte backup disc is insufficient to accept an external drive with 860 GBytes of video, 260 GBytes of picture files, 144 GBytes of music and 180 GBytes of “other” plus 188 GBytes from the back up of my on-board storage. This year, if I can, I intend to increase my on-board storage to 1 TByte and move the picture and music files back but that doesn’t alleviate the problem of backing up without buying an even bigger and expensive external drive.

The video files are fairly static so I could move them to a separate 1TByte drive and then just keep a copy of these on yet another drive manually and let Time Machine backup the on-board files and the external drive picture files.

Is there a better way? What do other members do?

Re: Storage Solutions

Avatar Rick Churchill
Thank you Tony. In a previous thread you advised me that Time Machine will work with 2 separate backup drives so it was easy to leave all my photo, video and music files on the external drive and back up the photos and on-board documents to one 2TByte backup drive and the video and music less often (because they rarely change) to another.

Additionally my external drive is velcro-ed to the MacBook case to avoid regularly dropping it onto the carpet which is why the previous drive interface probably failed. This allows me to remove it if I'm transporting the drive.

I am waiting delivery of this great looking screwdriverless case for my naked 2TByte drive recovered after the interface failed.

Re: Storage Solutions

Avatar Rick Churchill
Help! I had Time Machine set up to backup my on-board storage and my picture files (from an external drive) to "backup external drive 1" and the other folders (on the external drive) to a "backup external drive 2". Unfortunately it failed as TM determined there was not enough space on the second backup drive (it was 867GBytes onto a 1TByte drive).

I waited for the USB3 hard disc enclosure to arrive and employed my spare 2 TByte drive as the second backup drive instead of the 1TByte drive.

But now I cannot work out how I managed to get TM to work with 2 different drives with 2 sets of data. In TM preferences it is possible to add a drive with Select Disk but the only choice is to allow TM to back up the same set of data configured using Options, to both drives alternatively.

I'm beginning to think I imagined it!

Re: Storage Solutions

Avatar Tony Still
I don't understand why 867GB didn't back-up onto a 1TB drive. I presume that the drive must be formatted as macOS Extended (HFS+) or TM would have complained; I also presume that it was empty when you started.

I have not seen TM configurations other than backing-up the same data to multiple drives (which supports the off-site drive use case). You can choose to exclude directories from TM back-ups but, as far as I know, those settings are common to all TM backup drives.

You might be able to juggle the exclusion settings according to which back-up drive is connected: that doesn't sound like a sustainable scheme but perhaps you managed it just once?

Re: Storage Solutions

Avatar Trevor Hewson
In the days of .mac and the iDisk, I used a program called Chronosync as a means of updating my website (by 'backing up' the local version to the one on the iDisk). I was promised free updates for life and to date they have honoured the promise.

After many years of not using it, I blew the dust off and updated it earlier this year in order to use it for updating the music files on two USB sticks for use with our new stereo units. It still seems to work very well and could be a good candidate for backing some of your files which you have excluded from Time Machine.

Chronosync is available from www.econtechnologies.com I see that (unsurprisingly) it costs a bit more than the $20 that I recall paying way back when!

Re: Storage Solutions

Avatar Mick Burrell
Another vote for chronosync. I used to use it for synchronising several parts of my main desk machine with my laptop prior to spending a few days in The Lake District - every 4 or 5 weeks! I could then work on and sync back when I got home. Worked flawlessly.*

*There's an issue syncing email from POP accounts as Apple changed the internals of Mail but it doesn't sound as if that would affect you.

Re: Storage Solutions

Avatar Rick Churchill
Thanks to you all. I'll investigate Chronosync. Am also looking at NAS drives now as a possible "futureproof"solution. It's a chance to get more tech!
 
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