Time Machine Paranoia

I love Time Machine. It’s the best designed, most reliable backup program I’ve ever seen. However, it’s got one major problem: it only lets you maintain one backup at a time. You can switch disks if you want, but then you only have one up-to-date backup and I want at least two. (Backup drives fail too, sometimes at the same time the main disk fails.)

Has anyone figured out how to make two independent backups to two different disks? Note that I don’t want to keep manually switching between disks. I want Time Machine to keep two (better yet three) backups up-to-date at all times.

Bonus points if you can do it over the network.

2 Responses to “Time Machine Paranoia”

  1. John Cowan Says:

    You want three backup disks at the same time, safe from any disaster that can claim your main hard disk? Switch to JungleDisk.

  2. macsimcon Says:

    We use OS X Server 10.5.6 to advertise a volume specifically for Time Machine backups of the users’ laptops. What’s more, the Time Machine volume is located on a four-drive RAID 5 NAS available over Ethernet. If the OS X Server fails, we can still get to the TM sparseimage on the NAS.

    The RAID protects us from a single-drive failure, and we always have the option of backing up the TM volume to one of our other RAIDs, tape, or a volume for off-site storage if need be.

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