How Do You Know if Two Timemachine Backups Are the Same

Apple tree's Fourth dimension Car software helps yous create a backup of your Mac difficult bulldoze. That's groovy, just what if something happens to the external drive yous're using for the Time Motorcar backup? If you're following our 3-2-1 Backup Strategy, and so you'll be protected, but you lot can do more, too.

How about using multiple backup drives with Fourth dimension Motorcar? Hither's how.

Some Background on Time Auto

Time Machine is more than just fill-in software for your Mac. You can recall of it every bit a tool that keeps moments in time for you to look back on, and then you can recover deleted or missing files or even revert to older versions of files you've worked on.

Time Machine stores hourly backups for 24 hours, daily backups for the by month, and weekly backups for all previous months for every bit much space equally you have on your Fourth dimension Machine fill-in drive. The oldest backups get deleted when the bulldoze fills upwardly. That makes it great for backups, but non great for archives, which require long-term storage. For more on the difference betwixt backups and athenaeum, see our mail, What's the Diff: Backup vs Archive.

Which Storage Devices Tin can be used with Time Machine?

Time Machine supports any of the post-obit external storage devices.

• External drive connected to your Mac, such as a USB, Thunderbolt, or FireWire drive
• External drive continued to an Airdrome Extreme Base Station (802.11ac model) or Airport
• Time Sheathing (See our postal service, What's the Unequal: Time Motorcar vs. Time Sheathing)
• AirPort Time Capsule
• Mac shared as a Time Auto backup destination
• Network-attached storage (NAS) device that supports Time Automobile over SMB

What is less well known is that you lot can use a single Time Machine fill-in drive with multiple Macs. If you have a big deejay, you can partition it and apply role of information technology for regular data and role of information technology for a Time Machine fill-in.

You lot also can use your Mac with more than one Fourth dimension Automobile backup drive. Let's encounter how that works.

Use More than One Backup Disk Using Deejay Rotation

Disk rotation is a technique borrowed from corporate IT professionals. The aphorism, "Don't put all your eggs in ane handbasket," is the reason. While Time Machine is great backup software, it'due south not foolproof. If your Time Machine backup bulldoze dies — as hard drives eventually practice — all of that information will exist gone.

Are you interested in hard bulldoze failure rates? And then are nosotros! Y'all see, nosotros utilise over 100,000 hard drives in our cloud data centers! Read our Hard Drive Reliability Stats to acquire more than.

Having Backblaze Personal Cloud Fill-in is a great way to fix that, of grade, because your data is also backed up to the cloud. They're complementary to one another: Backblaze tracks the last 30 days of changes to your files, for example, while Time Motorcar volition keep track of as many changes as it can within the storage capacity of your backup drive. And then it's nice — ideal, really — to take both.

Tip: If you take a Backblaze backup in addition to Time Machine, and you're planning to restore from Fourth dimension Automobile, it's a skillful idea to save a restore from Backblaze prior to initiating your Time Auto restore in case anything goes incorrect. Nosotros wrote a aid folio on the topic, Before You Restore With Time Machine.

Fortunately, Time Machine handles disk rotation with ataraxy. You lot tin adhere a 2nd hard drive and use information technology with Time Machine with only a couple of clicks. When Time Machine is continued to your first backup drive, it volition dorsum everything upwards. Then information technology'll do the same for the 2nd ane. Time Machine backs up everything that's inverse on your Mac's hard drive since the last time that backup drive was connected. So each drive will go along a complete Fourth dimension Machine backup.

How to Utilize Multiple Fill-in Drives with Time Motorcar

1. Connect your second difficult drive to your Mac.
2. Click on the Time Machine icon in the card bar, then click on Open Time Machine preferences.
3. Click Select Disk.
   
4. Select the drive you desire to rotate, then click Utilize Deejay.
5. Time Automobile will ask you if y'all want to replace your existing Time Machine drive, or use both drives. Click Use Both.
   

Time Motorcar will now dorsum upwards to each private bulldoze as they're connected.

When you want to check on your Fourth dimension Machine backups after, all yous need to do is hold downwards the pick key when clicking on the Time Auto icon in your menu bar. You lot'll meet Browse Other Backup Disks. You can employ that to browse whichever Time Machine fill-in you'd like.

The same procedure works if you mix a Time Motorcar fill-in drive with Apple's Time Capsule network device (a home Wi-Fi router with congenital in backup bulldoze). You can back up to both without any trouble.

Using this procedure, your data is backed up on 2 (or more than) drives. You can go out i at domicile and leave the other in the role, for case. That manner y'all'll never be without a backup you tin recover from quickly and easily.

Other Time Machine Backup Tips:

• To exclude items from your fill-in, open Time Machine preferences, click Options, then click the Add together (+) button to add an item to be excluded. To stop excluding an item, such as an external hard drive, select the item and click the Remove (–) button.
• If using Time Motorcar to back up to a network deejay, you can verify those backups to make certain they're in good condition. Printing and concord Choice, then choose Verify Backups from the Time Machine menu.
• In Bone X Lion v10.7.three or later, you can start up from your Fourth dimension Auto disk, if necessary. Printing and concord Option as your Mac starts up. When you see the Startup Manager screen, choose "EFI Boot" as the startup disk.
• If you lot're a Synology NAS user, you lot might be interested in our blog post, Backup and Restore Time Machine using Synology and the B2 Cloud.

Do You lot Employ Time Automobile for Local Backups?

Exercise you lot employ Time Machine and have y'all fix a disk rotation scheme? Do you lot combine Time Automobile with cloud fill-in? Or, do yous withal have questions? Let us know in the comments.

•  •  •

Editor's Annotation: This mail was updated from May three, 2016.

Roderick has held marketing, engineering, and product direction positions with Adobe, Microsoft, Autodesk, and several startups. He'south consulted to Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Stanford University, Dell, the Pentagon, and the White House. He was a Ford-Mozilla Fellow in Media and Democracy with Common Cause in Washington, D.C., where he advocated for a free, open, and attainable internet for all, reducing media consolidation, and transparency in politics and the media.

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Source: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/use-multiple-hard-drives-time-machine/

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