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General discussion

Best way to backup a Time Machine backup?

Jun 18, 2008 10:35PM PDT

I'm using Time Machine and an external Firewire drive to back up an iMac with 2 user accounts (password protected) and an external USB drive containing all my iTunes media. All in all there is about 290 GB of data in the Time Machine backup.

So what's the simplest way to create an offsite backup of the two user accounts and the external USB drive on a single 500 GB USB drive? I've tried using Apple's "Backup" software but even though it claimed it successfully completed the backup it did not include the external drive or the 2nd user account (presumably because of permissions).

The fact that it didn't even both mentioning upon completion that some data could not be backed up makes me highly suspicious of the Backup software. I know I can go in and treat these as three separate backups backing up each user account seperately to get around the permissions issue but I'm looking for a simple one touch way to get all this data onto backup onto the drive so I don't have to babysit the backup process.

Is it possible to just copy the data from the Time Machine drive to the Off site backup drive or is that data useless once copied from the Time Machine drive itself?

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

Discussion is locked

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Time machine
Jun 19, 2008 4:07AM PDT

It should be possible to copy the folder on the Time Machine disk and put it somewhere safe.

Be aware that this file will get HUGE over time as it continues to add to the file until the drive is almost full.

P

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Thanks. I think I found a good solution.
Jun 19, 2008 9:47AM PDT

Super Duper! will make clones of Time machine volumes (the paid version will do incremental clones to save time on future backups)

My Time machine drive is 750GB but only 280Gb is used right now. By the time the clone gets too big to fit on the 500GB off site drive 750 drives should be cheap and I'll just get a new one.

But this does provide an easy way to keep 7 years worth of ripped CD's purchased downloads and all my pictures safe. Time Machine does all the heavy lifting and then once every week or too I bring home my drive from work press a button in Super Duper and walk away.

So much easier than the overwrought, time consuming backup strategy I was using.

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Not Bad!
Jun 19, 2008 10:30PM PDT

However, bear in mind that any drive, make that ALL drives, will fail at some time in the future.

Archiving to DVD, or even Blue-Ray, would probably be a better long term solution. Once archived, you would only need to re-record once every 5 years or so.

Just a thought

P

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Good idea.
Jun 19, 2008 10:57PM PDT

I'n a year or so I'll likely upgrade my iMac and hopefully there will be Blu-ray drives built-in by then. 300 GB of DVD's would be pretty painful to burn.

In the meantime I'm really happy with the Time Machine/Super Duper combo. Finally a backup system where very little can fall through the cracks. These Time Machine volumes can even help me transition all my stuff to a new machine.