I know there's tons of info elsewhere on this but I'll ask here to get a fresh and personnal perspective...
I just picked up a couple of LaCie drives at decent prices, a 1TB and a 3TB. I have a Macbook with 120 gig hd and an Imac with a 320 gig drive, plus 5 other external (1 tb to 80g in size) drives with years of un-editied home videos, and photos all stored/created using Iphoto and Imovie. The MB and Imacs also have small partitions with Windows on them.
I was thinking of using the new 1TB, after partitionning, to be my Time Machine back up for the Imac and Macbook. The 3TB as back-up, of my videos and photos. The Imac also has a few Imovie(s) that are almost completed editions of some home movies.
So, from what I understand, Time Machine is not an archival program so I shouldn't expect to find my edited photos and videos with it should the Imac drive crash? (is that correct?) Best to make a Super Duper copy and a Time machine copy of the Imac as well?
Any suggestions..?
I use Time Machine to back up my "boot" drive and Carbon Copy to back up my externals. Time Machine is great if you ever have to restore your boot disk, it's fantastic at doing that. I have recovered from a bad hard drive and the standard install adds a little Time Machine recovery step at the very end, and the restore was so perfect that when I finally rebooted - the same windows I had open when I crashed re-appeared.
Time Machine will back up everything on your boot drive, so if that's where your iPhoto/iMovie files are, then yes, it does back them up too. However, I keep all my working files on externals and they get incrementally backed up once a day.
That's my setup, and it works like a charm. I used Carbon Copy Cloner because it's freeware, but Super Duper should be able to do the same thing.
Happy Mac'ing!
Dan
OK, I have been experimenting with some of the programs you mentioned Dan. I was just reading up on the instructions for Super Duper last night and they have their Sandbox which sounds pretty good for emergency boot-ups.
I have the 1TB drive divided in two. One partition is for the TM back up of the iMac and will probably do the 2nd partition as a CCC or SD copy of the same computer.
I tried copying logical drive of 150 gigabytes onto the 3 TB using the OSX disk utility but it would have taken 8 hours, yet just copy and paste does the same job in less than two hour. Strange...
Just downloaded CCC so I'll see how well it works..
Thanks
JM