Time Machine back up all hard drives?

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I am running a mac pro with all 4 Hard Drive bays in use. I have my system drive, and then two other hard drives that store project information for recording. My 4th drive is my back up drive. Does Time machine back up all 3 of my drives? I know that it is designed to recover my system drive. But let's say that one of my project drives dies, what would the process be like to restore information back onto a new replacement project drive?
 
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Back up all drives

If your other drives are HFS+ Journaled formatted then time machine will back them up. You should check time machine's settings, in it you can select drives to exclude. On mine it automatically had a FAT32 and NTFS partition excluded. Ensure your other drives that you want time machine to back up are not on the exclude list. If there is a HFS formatted drive you do want time machine to exclude, go into time machine preferences and add the drive to the excluded list.
 
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Restoring drive

Time machine backs up each drive into a separate folder. When you need to restore a specific drive it will go to that folder and restore that data in that folder. I don't have any details from experience.
 
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Thanks for the replies. I just went into my Time Machine Drive and I noticed that each of the Backup folders have my drives listed that are being backed up.

It appears that it backups the whole drives almost every hour. For example, I can go into a backup of an hour ago or any backups from yesterday and has the entire drive backed up each time.??? That is confusing to me, because my drive has over 132 GB of info on it. So it would seem that it would fill up my Time Machine Drive within 5-6 hours. Yet, I have 18 backups that each have my whole drive copied on it.

Does Time machine somehow work with the drive so that it really doesn't copy the whole drive every hour, yet somehow Aliases the information into each backup? Does that make sense?

I guess I am now concerned about CPU resources if it is backing up 140 + GB every hour. But it doesn't really feel like it is ever doing that.
 
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The backup is incremental meaning after the initial backup it only backs up added and changed files. If you have changed or added a file it will back up the new copy of the file and keep the old version of the file should you need to restore it. You can see the old version by scrolling back though time. If you add a new file it just copies it into the back up.
 
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The backup is incremental meaning after the initial backup it only backs up added and changed files. If you have changed or added a file it will back up the new copy of the file and keep the old version of the file should you need to restore it. You can see the old version by scrolling back though time. If you add a new file it just copies it into the back up.

Thanks Dan!

Do you know how OSX does it incrementally, yet still shows the whole drive in each dated backup folder? Do each of these folders somehow reference the same material, even though they are in different folders? It appears as if each folder is backing up the whole drive all over again.
 
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Thanks Dan!

Do you know how OSX does it incrementally, yet still shows the whole drive in each dated backup folder? Do each of these folders somehow reference the same material, even though they are in different folders? It appears as if each folder is backing up the whole drive all over again.

Yes they reference the same material, I've guessing via hard links. The way Time Machine works is seems very similar to the way an age old Linux tool called 'rsync' works.

The system is pretty simple and ingenious at the time same. If a file still exists but hasn't changed since the last back it hard links the file to it's original backup instead of making a duplicate copy and wasting space.

The Wikipedia entry explains it well, probably better than me. :) Time Machine (Apple software) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia check out the how it works section.
 
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Yes they reference the same material, I've guessing via hard links. The way Time Machine works is seems very similar to the way an age old Linux tool called 'rsync' works.

The system is pretty simple and ingenious at the time same. If a file still exists but hasn't changed since the last back it hard links the file to it's original backup instead of making a duplicate copy and wasting space.

The Wikipedia entry explains it well, probably better than me. :) Time Machine (Apple software) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia check out the how it works section.

Thank you. This is good stuff.
 

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