Advantageous to use SD! to clone my Time Machine partition?

[ScuseMe]

Hi,

I'm getting ready to start on a large Final Cut Studio project, so I'm reviewing my current backup situation. I have a question regarding my Time Machine partition, and if I should include it in my daily cloning strategy with SD!.

My development iMac has a 1TB internal drive. Hooked to it via Firewire are 2 - 2TB drives. On one of those drives I have my TM partition. On the other drive I have a SD! partition, where I clone my iMac's internal drive daily at 4:30 am. This SD! partition is bootable for emergencies.

While in the process of setting up a new partition to contain my Final Cut Studio projects and assets, I've decided to allow Time Machine to backup these assets. However, I'm also going to use SD! to clone that FCS partition every day at my normal 4:30 am clone time. While I was setting this procedure up, I realized that I don't have a copy of the TM partition anywhere. This bothered me. I like the fact that I can go back in time to restore a file I might have inadvertently changed/deleted. My SD! clone only has a current image of my boot drive.

Is SD! even able to clone a TM partition? If it is, can I restore the TM partition with the SD! copy if the TM partition got damaged? Am I over-thinking everything

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[dnanian]

As you'll see in Help > Frequently Asked Questions, it is certainly possible to copy a Time Machine volume. But it can take quite a long time to do...

[ScuseMe]

Thanks Dave.

I guess I have to figure out if the time involved is worth the small chance that I'll need it, seeing that I already have a SD! partition.

[dnanian]

You could also use a redundant RAID device to store both backups to help protect against unexpected hardware failures.

[ScuseMe]

Good idea. I have a 4-drive RAID-X that I use as a container for my music in iTunes. I could probably build a inexpensive RAID-1 2-drive enclosure for TM (or SD! for that matter). Speed isn't important in that case, but data integrity is.

Thanks for the idea Dave.