os x + ext drives + mirroring (?)
Out of context: Reply #6
- Started
- Last post
- 13 Responses
- ribit0
It sounds like you want to do incremental, scheduled backup, not mirroring/cloning. You need to use software like Retrospect (and there's a few good free ones too), and set it up to run a backup say every day at 3am. The software will backup every version of every file that is created or is changed, so you can jump back to any previous backed up version of any file or folder. (Mirroring doesn't give you this, it only protects against hardware failure, and if you accidently delete a file, it gets deleted from the mirror as well...)
I usually have say a 500GB drive setup to backup a 160GB laptop drive, because over years the backup set gets bigger than the original drive size (since it is storing every saved version of every file, and also the files that you deleted from the original drive). Drive space is cheap enough these days that it makes sense to just keep letting the backup set expand, and if you ever need that file from 3 years ago that you deleted 1 year ago... you've still got it...