Mountain Lion includes a feature to configure multiple Time Machine locations and to back up to those locations when they become available (plugged in external drives, accessible network drives, etc). Can 10.8 or any older version of OSX, possibly including third party software, be configured to back up different data to different locations?
Use case: I have 100GB of storage available on a cloud storage server, and a 250GB external hard drive. I want everything on my computer except media (photos, videos, music) backed up to both of those locations. I have another much larger drive that is accessible less often that I keep backups of my media on. Currently I have Time Machine configured with an exception list for the media locations and it backs up to all three drives (dumbly in 10.7, but smartly when I upgrade to 10.8) and then I manually make a backup of all the media directories using rsync occasionally. I would love for the media backup to be automatic when I plug in the large drive.
Best Answer
The short answer is no, but here is why and how the exclusions work when you pick different rules for two accounts.
Whether you have one backup destination or two, the rules for multiple users is to combine the exclusions for each user with the exclusions from the system so that each user can exclude different things, but there is no "inclusion" mechanism to add something back that another user has denied.
There is a nice article on having multiple users and goes into more details on setting up multiple exclusion lists:
It's not going to save backup time or space as you asked, but perhaps drives can get larger and you could just have both drives hold the same content since incremental updates mean that unless a file changes, it only gets copied once to each destination, speeding backups for subsequent backups to each individual drive when it's connected.
Pulling one drive from rotation with two works well as the system just carries on with the drive connected and then when the further out of date drive mounts again, one of the next two backups will catch it up with all changes since it was last mounted during a backup.