Mac – Time Machine Backup: separate configurations for different drives

time-machine

I have limited storage on a NAS to which Time Machine backs up documents. I’ve excluded system file directories and a few more to save space. I also have a large portable drive. A few times a year I back up pretty much everything to that.

Right now, I’m doing that by removing one drive before adding the other. Then I change the list of excluded folders, wait till the backup is done and repeat.

Is there a quicker, more reliable way to do this?

Best Answer

"A few times a year I back up pretty much everything to that."

I suggest you use a cloning software package for making your once in awhile copies.

I use Time Machine to get a historic copies of my files and a cloning software package to get a bootable clone of my Startup Disk.

Carbon Copy Cloner will copy your Startup Disk to an external FireWire drive. You can boot from the external drive to verify that you have a good clone. When you upgrade your existing Startup Disk, you can at any time boot from your external drive and go back to your existing system.

_{Slightly modified excerpts from SuperDuper's webpage...}

SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. It's incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper's built-in scheduler makes it trivial to back up automatically. And it runs beautifully on both Intel and PowerPC Macs!

Give SuperDuper a workout on your own system. Clone to your heart's content, for free. See what else is possible. When you're convinced that SuperDuper is a terrific solution — and a great value at $27.95 — you can register right from the application and start using its advanced features immediately!

Disk Utility Apple has included an option in Disk Utility – ‘Restore’. This option in Disk Utility allows you to copy the entire data of your hard disk to another hard drive or any external media.

dd command

-- the dd command is not for amateurs. -- you have been warned. --

You can use the dd command to backup a drive or partition. You need to be familiar with /Applications/Utilities/Terminal. I added this section for completeness.

# save
dd if=/dev/disk0s10 bs=4096m | gzip | dd of=~/disk0-s10 bs=4096m
# restore
dd if=~/disk0-s10 bs=4096m | gunzip | dd of=/dev/disk0s10 bs=4096m


This is riskie if you have never done it before. It may be hard to figure out the correct drive name.

How do use dd:
get a second disk the same size or larger.

What the unix name of the disk will be depends on how you attach the disk. 

without the old drive attached to
diskutil list
df


attach the new drive before booting.
repeat the above so you can figure out the name.

Now, that you name the names, you can copy the old disk, /dev/disk0,  to the new disk, /dev/disk1.  

sudo dd if=/dev/disk0 bs=4096m |  sudo dd of=/dev/disk1 bs=4096m

# this command should do a block by block copy
# this way you will get the whole disk.
# if= is input
# of= is output

mac $ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage                         999.3 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD           *999.0 GB   disk1
                                 Logical Volume on disk0s2
                                 B5476F09-70EA-41C6-8655-72485151AD19
                                 Unencrypted
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *4.0 TB     disk2
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Backup - Mac Mini       999.3 GB   disk2s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             784.2 MB   disk2s3
   4:                  Apple_HFS Backup - Time Machine   2.0 TB     disk2s4
   5:                  Apple_HFS Boot - for Fun          49.5 GB    disk2s5
   6:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk2s6
   7:                  Apple_HFS 1T Backup               985.1 GB   disk2s7
mac $ 
mac $ df
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity   iused    ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk1     930Gi  864Gi   66Gi    93% 226596185 17296037   93%   /
devfs          193Ki  193Ki    0Bi   100%       669        0  100%   /dev
map -hosts       0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%         0        0  100%   /net
map auto_home    0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%         0        0  100%   /home
/dev/disk2s2   931Gi  765Gi  166Gi    83% 200428475 43553456   82%   /Volumes/Backup - Mac Mini
/dev/disk2s4   1.8Ti  1.6Ti  147Gi    92% 441119165 38598628   92%   /Volumes/Backup - Time Machine
/dev/disk2s5    46Gi   29Gi   17Gi    63%   7590207  4490899   63%   /Volumes/Boot - for Fun
/dev/disk2s7   917Gi  771Gi  147Gi    84% 202019436 38487474   84%   /Volumes/1T Backup
mac $

http://www.stellarclonedrive.com/disk-utility-to-clone-mac-drive.php

Related Solutions

IMac – Restore Time Machine backup onto different Mac

There are a couple different approaches you can take.

Approach 1 - Erase the newer iMac, reinstall 10.6.8 and use migration assistant to migrate your Time Machine data

With the newer iMac:

Insert your Snow Leopard DVD (not the gray disc, a retail copy) and boot to it either by holding C while powering on or holding option while powering on and then selecting the 10.6 DVD.
Select "Disk Utility" from the Utilities menu in the Snow Leopard installer
Select the iMac's hard drive from the list on the left in Disk Utility, click on the "Erase" tab, type in a name for the hard drive (Macintosh HD?) and click erase.
Once the hard drive is erased you can close Disk Utility and proceed with the installation of 10.6, following the on screen prompts.
Once the installation is finished your newer iMac will boot to the normal welcome to OS X screen.
I believe the third or fourth step in setting up the newly installed 10.6 will ask you if you want to transfer information from an existing Mac. Make sure your external Time Machine disk is connected and choose the "From a Time Machine Backup" option and follow the onscreen prompts.
Once the migration is finished you should be able to login with your normal user account and your data should appear to be just as it was the last time your old Mac backed up.

Approach 2 - Clone your older iMac to the newer iMac

This requires that you have a firewire cable

With your older iMac:

Download Carbon Copy Cloner on your older iMac
Power on your newer iMac while holding T, you should eventually see the Firewire symbol (sort of looks like a Y) floating around it's screen
Connect the two Macs together via a firewire cable, your newer iMac should appear as an external disk on your older iMac's desktop
Open Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities) on your older iMac
Select the newer iMac's hard drive (should be an orange icon) from the list on the left in Disk Utility, click on the "Erase" tab, type in a name for the hard drive (Macintosh HD?) and click erase.
Once the newer iMac's hard drive is erased you can open Carbon Copy Cloner
Follow the on screen prompts in Carbon Copy Cloner to select your newer iMac's hard drive as the destination and then clone your older iMac's hard drive over to it.
Once Carbon Copy Cloner is finished you should be able to boot your newer iMac and browse through to see all of your older iMac's data now in place.

Hopefully one of those options works and you're able to get that data migrated with little to no pain.

Mac – Time Machine – multiple backup destinations for a “separate weekly”

Basically, I would recommend not trying to constrain time machine to only a weekly interval on the offsite drive.

That being said, you can have both drives work totally independently as that is how the software is engineered. If you really only want a weekly snapshot, only connect the weekly drive once a week and force a rotation of the destination:

 tmutil startbackup --rotation

Once you have a backup to the weekly drive, eject it and send it away. As long as all dives get reattached every 14 days or so, you won't get a warning dialog that any are out of date.

Again, you can certainly enforce a single weekly backup by the procedure you follow but two things make that practice less needed than you might expect:

The backup intervals are very low space overhead compared to the size of cheap backup disks.

On my worst Mac, the system averages 5 MB of overhead for system log files so in absence of user files changing, you have 24 daily and 31 monthly snapshots you would avoid storing 275 MB (or 0.0003 of a one TB drive) if you were on a strict one per week schedule.

Since the cleanup of old backups is so fast and the storage impact so low, most clients with offsite rotation end up just swapping disks each week and let the software cull the extra snapshots per the normal schedule, leaving weekly snapshots more than a month old.

Best Answer

-- the dd command is not for amateurs. -- you have been warned. --

Related Solutions

IMac – Restore Time Machine backup onto different Mac

Mac – Time Machine – multiple backup destinations for a “separate weekly”

Related Question