Backup To More Than One Hard Drive

In this video, I’m going to show you how you can set up Time Machine on your Mac to back up to more than one hard drive. You can have a backup to multiple hard drives, and when your Mac does its hourly backup, it’ll alternate between those different backups. Let’s see how we do this. Let’s go to my Mac.

So I’m looking at my Mac. I have a few external drives plugged into my Mac. I have them hidden. Let’s go ahead and show them so I can show you what hard drives I have connected. To do that, what we do is we go to our Finder Preferences. So I go up to Finder in the menu bar, and then we go over to Preferences. I select this, I go over to General, and I make sure that I show my external drives.

So we can see that I have several drives here connected to my Mac. Well I have a couple of them that are set up for Time Machine. You’re going to see I have two of them here set up for Time Machine. So basically what’s going to happen here is when my Mac backs up using Time Machine, it backs up every hour, what it will do is it will alternate between these two hard drives. So one hour, it’ll go to my Passport Time Machine. The next hour it goes to my Drobo Time Machine. So it’s just going to alternate between these two drives. I could even add a third drive. I could add my FireWire 500 gigabyte drive to Time Machine.

How do we set this up? How do we set up Time Machine to back up to multiple drives? Well, it’s pretty simple. All we have to do is really just tell Time Machine that we want to use another. drive. In order to do that, we just go over to our System Preferences. I have it in my Dock here, and then we go over to Time Machine.

When I click on Time Machine, we can see that I have my two drives. I have my Drobo Time Machine and My Passport Time Machine. Again, we can see those here as well. I have my Drobo and My Passport. I want to add my FireWire 500. Well, all I need to do is just go back over to my Time Machine Preferences here, and I click on Add or Remove Backup Disk.

When I select this, I can add another drive. So now all I need to do is just select this and then I click on Use Disk. You’ll see another dialogue box where you can select if you want to replace your Time Machine backup, or if you want to use them both. What you want to do is select on Use Both. From that point on Time Machine will alternate between your two different hard drives. If you want to add a third hard drive, you can follow the same steps.

So that’s how you can tell your Mac to back up to multiple drives with Time Machine. All you have to do is just plug in your Mac and then go to the System Preferences Time Machine. From there, you add your new drive. You confirm that you want to use both for your Time Machine. And your Mac will start using both drives for your Time Machine. You’ll have two different backups.

So that’s how you can use more than one drive to back up your Mac with Time Machine.