Anyone know if it’s possible to have two different time machine backups on the go, or would it just be better to duplicate the time machine drive from time to time as a second?

Yes I think you can, it Time Machine be set to alternate between the two drives IIRC.

Do you mean the same mac backing up to two different drives? Can’t see any options to set something like this up.

Again IIRC you need both drives hooked up to see the option.

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/mountain_lion_backing_up_to_multiple_time_machine_drives

Sorry to Hijack, can you access a time machine away from home, like a personal cloud server?

Sorry to Hijack, can you access a time machine away from home, like a personal cloud server?

It’s not really designed like that, it’s just a backup of your laptop holding historical data. Some people backup to local drives, some to network drives and some to the cloud.

Sorry to Hijack, can you access a time machine away from home, like a personal cloud server?

If you mean can you access data on a Time Capsule away from home then the answer is yes using the “Back to my Mac” feature of iCloud. Whether you can access the time machine backup data on the time capsule I’m not so sure – I think it might be archived in a way that is not directly browsable. Also not 100% if you can access the Time Capsule unless it is from a mac. I think it’s VNC based so should be platform agnostic but don’t take my work for it.

Okay, cheers. Thinking about ditching my windows pc and getting a macbook, but I’d need something to store all my music, pictures, videos etc on. Would a time capsule be the ‘standard route’ to go down. Away from home I could just take a portable hard drive I s’pose

Okay, cheers. Thinking about ditching my windows pc and getting a macbook, but I’d need something to store all my music, pictures, videos etc on. Would a time capsule be the ‘standard route’ to go down. Away from home I could just take a portable hard drive I s’pose

Time machine is the backup programme. It’s on the computer itself by default. You can then also do additional time machine backups to external drives, Time Capsule being one. (I use a TC as well as a portable HDD as my away from machine backups, with the portable HDD spending most of the week away from the home).

I’m not sure the TC is designed to work as you want – I suspect a NAS might be better for that (but that’s outside my realm of knowledge).

TC isn’t really designed as a file store, you’d need a NAS. Most NAS drives/enclosures these days are time machine compatible also. You can partition it and set up one partition as a network share/file store for music etc and another as a target for timemachine.

I use an Airport Extreme with a bunch of drives plugged into it – Time machine backs up multiple macs to one drive and the others are used for storage (eg one for movies – which my Apple TV connects to). All are accesible via the network.