Help me configure the ultimate Mac OSX backup solution.

December 20, 2007 7:04 PM

Help me configure the ultimate Mac OSX backup solution!

I just received two very nice external firewire hard drives for Christmas. My plan is to place my music collection on one drive and use the other drive to have a perfect copy of all my music in case the original fails. As I add to my collection every couple of days or so, I'd really like to automate this to create regular backups. My plan was to have both drives connected and powered on, with the backup drive unmounted. The OS would mount it when needed to do the backup and then unmount it again when it was finished. I thought I could accomplish this with SuperDuper! and its scheduling function, and for the most part it works. The only problem is when my wife logs in the system mounts the backup drive. Then spotlight wants to index it, and if I log in it seems to get stuck in this weird phase of mounting and unmounting.

If anyone could tell me step-by-step how to make this work and have the drive ONLY be mounted when it is needed to perform a backup, I would greatly appreciate it. If I can get this to work I'd like to do the same thing with my system drive and a 3rd firewire drive that I have.

posted by drgonzo2k2 to computers & internet (4 comments total)

The problem is that when a drive is unmounted and still powered up, how to get OS X to remount it without powercycling the drive.

I have almost the same backup solution... 1 Drobo connected to a G5, and an external FW drive as a backup for the Music in the aggregate Drobo Backup.

What I do is backup ALL my mac files (music / documents, etc. everything) to the Drobo, every day or so (using Chronosync), but I power on the FW drive once weekly, and Chronosync handles the secondary backing up of the music files only, to the FW drive.

Maybe that'll work for you.
posted by lonemantis at 7:28 PM on December 20, 2007

To prevent Spotlight from indexing the drives, mount them, then in Spotlight's preference pane (in System Prefs), go to the Privacy tab and add both drives to the privacy (no index) list.
posted by icebourg at 7:50 PM on December 20, 2007

How big are the three drives in question?

If the FW drives are larger than the source (internal?) drive, just use Time Machine (in 10.5) to make a backup of the entire internal drive. Use SuperDuper to clone the first external drive to the second.

Why mount/unmount at all? What's the motivation for that?

There's a great Take Control eBook that was just released on the subject of performing Mac Backups, and it's cheap too. Check it out.
posted by Wild_Eep at 7:07 AM on December 21, 2007

Unless you're already happily using Leopard, I'd strongly recommend that you don't upgrade just yet - I've got a couple of external USB drives (Icybox) one of which works fine, yet the other isn't recognised. Both worked perfectly under Tiger.

I don't have any direct help unfortunately, as I'm looking for a similar solution :)
posted by Chunder at 3:17 PM on December 21, 2007