Quote:
Originally Posted by Titan
Okay here is my scenario. I have the dns 323 with two 1tb drives. They are mirrored, which I understand means they maintain a copy of each other at all times. So if one drive craters, the other should be fine. Unless of course they both crater.
I also use time machine on a weekly basis to update the laptop but it is saying that it is running out of space. I thought time machine did incremental updates but it want 180 gb to do a backup. This means I only have one backup of my drive at a time which I thought was not the point of time machine?
What I am considering is another external drive to make a super duper backup of the hard drive and/or the nas.
If I bought a usb drive like this one: http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-BDL_V_35SE_528AS(ME).aspx
could I use it to put a superduper backup on it?
do I have to use a firewire drive like the documentation in superduper says?
Should I partition the new drive and put superduper on half and use the other half for time machine?
Does superduper need its own partition? how big should it be?
Any other considerations I should be taking into account?
Thanks in advance for any help. |
When you use Time Machine with network attached storage, it creates a large disk image, and stores the contents of your time machine backups inside that. What has happened is that there is not enough space to expand the size of the disk image, probably because your NAS is otherwise full.
If Time Machine is asking for 180 gb of additional space, and you've been performing backups to the NAS previously, its probably gotten confused and thinks the existing disk image does not belong to its backup set, so its actually looking for ANOTHER 180 gigs of space.
My advice would be to nuke the disk image on the NAS, reselect the NAS in Time Machine preferences as the destination for backups, and let it run a full backup from scratch again.
There are other things you could do to try and salvage the existing backup, and continue to use it, but I don't think they are worth it - why take chances with a backup that you want to be as bullet proof as possible.
If you are only using Time Machine on a weekly basis though, you would be better served using SuperDuper and its smart copy feature anyways - it'll maintain an exact copy of your macbook, and the storage requirements will not continue to grow. It also works fine with NAS storage - you don't need a physically attached disk, nor do you need any special partitioning.
SuperDuper is a very handy recovery solution too when a disk is failing - if Time Machine can't read a file, it will stop the backup, and you don't have a complete backup to restore from. SuperDuper, on the other hand, will continue to back up what it can read, which means you stand a good chance of being able to back up the entire system. I experienced this first hand a couple weeks ago swapping out a failing hard drive on a macbook - I couldn't get a complete TM backup, but SuperDuper got everything except for three unreadable MP3's, which was a small price to pay in exchange for getting the dying hard drive swapped out.
Redundant backups on Mac
