Backup Photos To home server from Imac

I just bought my first imac (27"imac with i7 processor, 1tb drive, 4gigs ram). I have had experience with mac's in the past and love the new imac. Just small growing pains. I have a older pc that was my photography machine. I didn't really use Windows home server backup utility to backup the computer. I simply used SYNCTOY by microsoft to backup my folder where my photographs were stored. Is there such a utility i can use.

This is what i have setup right now. I have a bunch of hard drives in my house so i took one of the external terrabyte drives and plugged it into my imac and that is the time machine backup drive i use. But....... i still want to be able to backup select folders (home movies and photographs) to my server so i can view them from other computers in the house. I am a redundancy nut as i don't want to loose my files. I even have a 1.5 tb drive i have all my movies/photos/mp3's backed up on that i bring to my office in case of worst case scenario, house fire........... Sort of poor man off site storage

• use time machine to backup to 1tb external drive
  
• run separate program to backup photos/movies to my windows home server for viewing from other computers in house
  
• Use same program to make same backups to my drive i bring to work

I use SuperDuper!. Pretty simple and is under $28. The free version will do what you want, but you'll have to manually start the backups.

MaxxuM wrote in post #11188469
I use SuperDuper!. Pretty simple and is under $28. The free version will do what you want, but you'll have to manually start the backups.

Yup. My Macs both have duplicate 500GB hard drives. Every night at 11:30, SuperDuper copies my main drive to my backup drive. It's a bootable copy, so if the first drive goes, I can still boot from the second. In addition, TimeMachine is backing up to an external 1TB drive. Meanwhile, once a week, all my photos are copied to a NAS device.

Just remember that if you want to be able to share files back and forth between Windows and Mac that you'll need to use a compatible file system. You're either going to have to install software on your Mac to allow it to write to NTFS, or format your Windows drives as Fat32.

I will check it out. The issue i am having at the moment is with time machine. I had an external 1tb drive and the first backup went great. I had to unplug the drive (ejected it correctly) to rearange desk, then i plugged it back in, On my desktop it shows time machine drive. But when time machine goes to run, it says not enough room on the external drive? Like it does not recognize the first back and just add to that? It wants to make a whole new back. I don't mind doing that as the computer is so new. But in the future, if i have to unplug this drive for whatever reason, I want to figure out how to get the conmputer to just keep adding to that drive when i plug it back in. I have read a bunch about remounting the drive, It looks like it is doing that?

Please help.

I've never had any Time Machine issues, and I unplug my drive all the time. A good source of info would be to go to Apples site. Click on support, click Communities, go to the Snow Leopard forum and within that there should be a Time Machine sub-forum. When I first switched to Mac I spent a lot of time in those forums and got a lot of useful info.

bphillips330 wrote in post #11203572
On my desktop it shows time machine drive. But when time machine goes to run, it says not enough room on the external drive?

This is usually because you've added a lot of files to your primary drive in the hour interval since the last backup and it causes the next iteration of backup to be substantially larger. As a rule, your TM drive should be at least 1.5x the size of your internal drive. Even then, the problem can occur. Do you have a lot large files (e.g., movies, video) taking up space on your primary drive?

Tony-S wrote in post #11204294
This is usually because you've added a lot of files to your primary drive in the hour interval since the last backup and it causes the next iteration of backup to be substantially larger. As a rule, your TM drive should be at least 1.5x the size of your internal drive. Even then, the problem can occur. Do you have a lot large files (e.g., movies, video) taking up space on your primary drive?

no. I don't think i added anything during the time. All i really have is about 500 gigs of pictures and the operating system. I did install a bunch of programs such as photoshop and lightroom. When I did first backup had roughly 500 gigs or so, now it is saying backup is 650 gigs and since the 1tb drive alreay has a little over 500 gigs on it. From what i read, if i have a 1tb drive inside of my computer, a 1tb external drive should be fine? I thought it just keeps adding to the current backup untill it fills up, then it deletes the older backups?

bphillips330 wrote in post #11203572
I will check it out. The issue i am having at the moment is with time machine. I had an external 1tb drive and the first backup went great. I had to unplug the drive (ejected it correctly) to rearange desk, then i plugged it back in, On my desktop it shows time machine drive. But when time machine goes to run, it says not enough room on the external drive? Like it does not recognize the first back and just add to that? It wants to make a whole new back. I don't mind doing that as the computer is so new. But in the future, if i have to unplug this drive for whatever reason, I want to figure out how to get the conmputer to just keep adding to that drive when i plug it back in. I have read a bunch about remounting the drive, It looks like it is doing that?

Please help.

What happens when you try to explore it? How far can you see back and is it seeing any backups at all. If it can see everything fine then one of two things may be happening. One, you've added a lot of files or two the backup is corrupt (misreading new files).

bphillips330 wrote in post #11204361
I thought it just keeps adding to the current backup untill it fills up, then it deletes the older backups?

That's exactly what it does. I've not had the issue you're seeing, and I also unplug my TM drive frequently...but it's 1TB and my system drive is 500GB. If I were you I'd reformat the TM drive and start over.

Hey all figured out what the time machine issue was. I had switched adapters (I originally had the hard drive plugged into a simple usb adapter to plug drive into usb port. Then after server was rebuilt, put it back in the western digital case with its adapter) I guess the Mac address or how ever they talk to computer changed so the Mac did not recognize it as the same hard drive........

With super duper. I am trying to use it right now. I wanted to try the free version first, but all I can seem to do is make a disk image vs select individual folders and tell it to sync. Is that possible with the paid version? I have multiple computers looking at these files on my server so I don't want a "image file" so to speak.

With sync toy. It was so nice, I made folder pairs (take this folder on this computer, and sync it with this folder on the server) and I ran it ever so often when I would do a bunch of photo stuff. Can I do that with super duper? chrono sync? I know there are a ton of sync programs out there. I just want a simple program

A free option that I use, is the included utility rsync which can be called from the command line.

You can setup rsync to sync folders from one computer to a second computer over ssh.

You can then set this rsync action to run automatically using cron at say midnight every day.

SuperDuper may provide nice gui accessibility, but this method is purely free and several tutorials exist to explain this process.