Cloning a Time Machine Disk

[stuppy]

Hi

I want to clone my time machine back up disk for extra redundancy. I tried setting this up and it seemed to be working but i soon realised that the two 1TB hard drives I am using had varying amounts of free space....

I.e. the Time Machine disk would have 20GB free, while the clone of the TM disk would have 30GB - where one would assume that using a Smart Update, the drives should be using pretty much the same amount of space.

Is there a reason for this and is there a way to get identical drives using SD?

Thanks.

[dnanian]

It's probably just because the spotlight index isn't copied... it's preserved on the destination and it'll regenerate.

[stuppy]

It's probably just because the spotlight index isn't copied... it's preserved on the destination and it'll regenerate.

Hi

Sorry I don't follow. The free space on both 1TB hard drives was completely different. If SD is doing a Smart Update to make the Time Machine Backup the same as the Time Machine disk, surely the amount of space used would be the same?

[dnanian]

Not necessarily, no. The spotlight index isn't copied... it's regenerated on the destination.

[stuppy]

Okay,

When I did have it set up though - the mirror of my Time Machine disk ran out of space so the backup failed. Since the time machine drive is full, Super Duper didn't seem to delete the files or update Spotlight or whatever and used more space than the TM drive.

[dnanian]

That can happen depending on what's changed on the Time Machine drive. It's very complicated to Smart Update something that complex if there's no free space.