time machine weekly backup

well i had to buy another external HD for my backups, time machine, my 4+ year old seagate goflex gave it up, i tried everything but no success. anyway ive looked at the app. Time Machine Editor, seems that i can set it to backup daily, weekly or monthly. any one else using this app. if so you like it, dont like it. im doing so much that i need to backup every hour, or even every day. in fact i think once a week will do fine. by the way, i HD is 750 gb and my time machine is 2tb. i have 180gb on my internal HD. including VMware fushion.

No TM for me prefer SuperDuper registered version. Weekly backup using Smart Backup simply updates what is new from week to week and the external with the clone is bootable. Seagate at one stage were warranting drive for as five year period. Any chance your drive fell into this category?

think it might be older because the first time i called them about 6 or so months ago, they said it was out of warranty.

checked out superduper. seems better but i already have time machine setup.

Time Machine works great

I use an external disk attached to an Airport Extreme to back up two Macs.

The Time Machine Editor gives you schedule options like daily, weekly, or whatever
you would like. It works fine.

The initial backup will takes some time (several hours probably) but the subsequent
backups are quick. (since it only backs up changes).
The recover is very intuitive and flexible, also works fine.

Your backup disk is plenty big enough.

Good Luck.
John

PS. One suggestion, once you have it set up, and working, DO NOT CHANGE THE
NAMES OF THE AIRPORT OR OF THE DISK. It is a nightmare to recover from that
type of change. Learned that the hard way.

well i have two 750 gb internal HDs. i clone one to the other as backup. so i guess ill stick with time machine and there hourly backups, daily backups would be fine but seeing as my old seagate lasted so long doing hourly backups this WD 3t should last a while, its guaranteed for 2 years and as long as it doesnt fail right when i need it ill be ok. could get another internal hd and partition it and use superduper on it. so if i set up Time Machine Editor it will erase what i have copied now and do a complete recopy.

Are you thinking of putting the SuperDuper clone and the Time Machine backup on different partitions of the same drive? If so be aware of one huge potential flaw: There are some disk drive failures that could rentder both partitions of the drive unusable simultaneously. If that happens both backups could be inaccessible.

think im just going to leave it the way it is now. my external hd is partitioned, 2t and 1t, i use the 1t for time machine for my macbook pro, snow leopard, the 2t partition is for my macpro desktop, lion.

well this WD HD isnt showing up 1/2 the time on my desktop so back to walmart it goes. picking up a seagate. what im going to do is partition it into 2 partitions, one 2t and the other 1t. im going to use the 2t for my desktop and the 1t for my macbook pro. anyone see anything wrong with doing this.

No need to partition the new drive for using it with two machines. Time Machine will keep the backups separate by itself, however, there is no harm in doing it that way.

well i already partitioned it. just read your post. now does it matter if i eject the external hd and then plug it into my other mac or would it be better to turn my mac off first then unplug it. the problem i had with the WD hd is that sometimes it wouldnt show up on my mac, even if it was showing up before i shut down, and left it connected. start back up and no hd detected fro time machine, hope that was just a wd thing and not a seagate thing, guess ill find out.

another question, would it be a bad idea to connect a usb y plug and leave my desktop connected all the time to my seagate external hd and then plug in my macbook pro in when i needed to back it up or could that create any problems

thinking more about it, and reading about it, i kind of wish id left it alone without any partition. i thought i needed it seeing as there two separate computers and two different osx versions.

well i decided to start over. no partitions. backup my desktop, osx lion, then my macbook pro, snow leopard.

well it works perfect. i see now that each computer has its own folder. i was looking at time machine like some kind of magic.