Originally Posted By: Virtual1
(a thunderbolt SSD TM drive for your mac with the SSD in it... is a beautiful thing)

Even more beautiful to me is a Thunderbolt RAID 5 array with SSD drives. The same Thunderbolt Raid 5 array with spinning rust drives is also a very attractive proposition, a lot less expensive and still pleasingly fast. That is what I use for my Time Machine drive and should one of the drives in the array fail, I can hot swap a new drive and the system will recreate the contents of the failed drive automatically. (I haven't tested that in a Time Machine backup set, but in theory it should work.)

However, as V1 points out there is a "metric crapton of hard links" in a Time Machine data set so in all likelihood even though the failed drive could be recreated automatically, I would probably scrub the array and start over with a new data set. My belt and suspenders backup solution is therefore to specify two Time Machine drives; the Thunderbolt RAID 5 array and a Time Capsule. Time Machine automatically alternates backups between the two so if either one fails I still have a backup data set that is at most two hours out of date. That way I have little or no hesitation scrubbing a failed data set and creating a new one. I have restored individual files and even performed a full system restoration from this setup and the only indication which data set Time Machine chooses is the speed of the restore/rebuild. Obviously the Thunderbolt RAID 5 array is orders of magnitude faster.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein