Backing up multiple internal drives - Time Machine?

I have a Mac Pro 3.2, quad core, 500gig SSD OS X , and 2x3T & 1x2T internal drives. The hdd are solely used to store photos - I keep none on the SSD.

I wish to back up the hdd's using Time Machine - can I do that?

If I can, would I have to do it manually- selecting which hdd I wanted backing up?

And finally, how large would my backup hdd's have to be...

Or can you recommend software that can do what I want.


Many thanks in advance,

You can back up any external/internal drive using time machine. Enter the time Machine preferences, go to options and you'll see a dialogue box where you can add or exclude items from the backup.

I don't know what the recommendations are for backup drive size but I would say that as data typically grows, starting of with a drive that is 2x as big as your total backup would be a minimum.

I don't use Time Machine for backing up RAID arrays for obvious reasons. The other exception are drives that contain critical data that I store a copy of outside my home. For cloning and backing up that data I use GoodSync.

I'm have a Mac Pro using an SSD with SATA drives for image storage. As already mentioned you can use Time Machine to back up any normal drive. The only consideration would be that whatever you are using as a backup drive will have to be pretty large if you want it to back up your system and all the images. Copying large amounts of data to an external drive can be quite slow, but you can just let it run in the background.

I keep my images on two internal drives called Image Files and Image Files Backup. Once a day SuperDuper makes a cloned copy.