Backup multiple drives to a single drive
 

Hello,

I wanna backup my iMac's internal and two external hard drives onto a third external hard drive.

Is this backup strategy possible with SuperDuper!? Ideally I would like to use the Smart Update feature rather than use the 'Copy Newer' or 'Copy Different' method.

Thank you very much for your help

Claude

It's definitely possible, but don't try to do it with Copy Newer or Copy Different. Instead, simply partition the external hard drive appropriately so there's a volume there for each source. Then, copy the drives to their corresponding partition on the backup.

Thanks for your fast reply. Hadn't thought about partitioning the drive. As soon as I receive the big backup drive I will set up 3 or maybe 4 partitions and setup SuperDuper! accordingly.

Claude

That should work just fine, Claude. Let us know how it works out.

I have another question about my backup strategy from above but isn't really SuperDuper! related, but I thought maybe you could give me your advice.

The backup drive I ordered is an IOMEGA UltraMax 640GB, which contains two 320GB drives, that can be set up either as a simple volume (Non-RAID), as a Spanned Volume (JBOD) or as a Striped Volume (RAID 0).

The capacity of my 3 drives I want to backup is as follows (real capacity in brackets):
1. iMac's internal HD: 80GB (74.4GB)
2. LaCie external FW HD: 250GB (232.7GB)
3. LaCie external FW HD: 250GB (232.7GB)

I don't know yet if the two drives in the UltraMax have a real capacity of 320GB or if it is in fact 298GB.

Initially I wanted to use RAID 0, but I guess since I have to partition the drive into 3, that wouldn't make much sense anymore, as I would end up with each partion being spread across the two drives.

I guess a Non-RAID configuration won't do me any good either because I need two 235GB partitions and one 75GB partition. If the two drives in the UltraMax have a real capacity of 320GB than I could use a Non-RAID setup but in the more likely case that the drives in the UltraMax have a real capacity of 298GB, this scenario won't work.

So I would have to use the JBOD configuration in order to achieve the backup strategy I want to use, or is my preferred method (RAID 0) still the way to go?

I'm sorry if I'm not supposed to post threads that don't concern SuperDuper! directly but I thought maybe you could clear this matter up for me.

Again thanks for your great help,

Claude

My honest advice is to not use internal striping (or spanning) at all. I just don't like striping as it basically doubles the chance of failure, and takes both "drives" (and all data) with it.

I'd rather see you get another drive that's a single mechanism unit (or is internally mirrored).