While Time Machine is great backup software, it’s not foolproof. The adage, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” is the reason. Use More than One Backup Disk Using Disk Rotationĭisk rotation is a technique borrowed from corporate IT professionals. You also can use your Mac with more than one Time Machine backup drive. If you have a large disk, you can partition it and use part of it for regular data and part of it for a Time Machine backup.

What is less well known is that you can use a single Time Machine backup drive with multiple Macs. Network-attached storage (NAS) device that supports Time Machine over SMB.Mac shared as a Time Machine backup destination.Time Capsule (See our post, What’s the Diff: Time Machine vs.External drive connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station (802.11ac model) or AirPort.External drive connected to your Mac, such as a USB, Thunderbolt, or FireWire drive.Time Machine supports any of the following external storage devices. Which Storage Devices Can be used with Time Machine? For more on the difference between backups and archives, see our post, What’s the Diff: Backup vs Archive. That makes it great for backups, but not great for archives, which require long-term storage. The oldest backups get deleted when the drive fills up. Time Machine stores hourly backups for 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for all previous months for as much space as you have on your Time Machine backup drive. I used an external cable to hook up my old HDD and have been manually moving files over.Get more details about Time Machine in our guide, How to Back Up Your Mac. I ended up doing an Internet Restore of Lion, then upgrade to El Capitan. seemed a bit drastic and I wasn’t entirely sure whether my files would be safe having removed and replaced them… I couldn’t get any reassurances so…

I did not follow these instructions as removing my drives from the DM rebooting, replacing, etc.

Boot and get the system to pick-up the DM.

Replace TB cable with USB3.0 cable (even though my iMac only supports 2.0).

I called the support line and the process discussed was something like: Nothing I did would let me proceed with the recovery. I opened the Disk Utility and could see a drive mounted with some generic name and a single partition, but that was about it. The Drobo Mini was not recognized as a “Time Machine” backup drive. Everything worked perfectly until I tried to run the Mac recovery sequence. However, I have a Mid 2011 iMac 27' and today swapped out the HDD for an SSD. I have the exact same configuration on my Drobo Mini and have successfully been running TM backups for well over a year via Thunderbolt cable.

Partition hard drive for time machine