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I have a TM volume on my desk at work and I also have one at home. That way, I have a better shot of my data surviving a disaster. Right noow I have to manually change the TM volume based on where I am.

I'd like to use some location aware software (like Marco Polo) and have it just switch the volume. I tried using Applescript and Automator to make the switch but I haven't been able to be consistently successful.

I'm looking for a more terminal/shellscript based way to switch the TM volume.

Any ideas?

user14567
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  • Which OSX version (Snow Leopard or Lion) are you using? – nohillside Dec 05 '11 at 14:00
  • What I'd really like is the ability to have more than one TM volume "active" at the same time. It works great with manual switching, but why is that necessary? – Thilo Dec 06 '11 at 07:32
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    You might want to have a look at the 'tmutil' command, especially at 'tmutil associatedisk'. – bot47 Mar 05 '12 at 08:16

2 Answers2

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Time Machine supports multiple backup volumes on Mountain Lion.

Backup to multiple locations

Time Machine allows you to choose multiple backup locations and seamlessly switch between them. Now you can have a backup of your data at work and at home.

Lri
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What I'd do is the following. You need to create a copy of /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist. Put it somewhere (example: ~/somewhere/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist.diskA). Then change from System Preferences the disk to which you want to back up. Create another copy and put it to ~/somewhere/com.apple.com.TimeMachine.plist.diskB). Then do something like this

ln -s ~/somewhere/com.apple.com.TimeMachine.plist.disk ~/somewhere/com.apple.com.TimeMachine.plist.diskB
sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist
sudo ln -s ~/somewhere/com.apple.com.TimeMachine.plist.disk /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist

Then the script when using disk A would be

rm ~/somewhere/com.apple.com.TimeMachine.plist.disk 
ln -s ~/somewhere/com.apple.com.TimeMachine.plist.diskA ~/somewhere/com.apple.com.TimeMachine.plist.disk

and when using disk B would be rm ~/somewhere/com.apple.com.TimeMachine.plist.disk ln -s ~/somewhere/com.apple.com.TimeMachine.plist.diskB ~/somewhere/com.apple.com.TimeMachine.plist.disk

This way you don't have to use sudo with MarcoPolo (BTW you should really use ControlPlane which picks up where MarcoPolo left).

EDIT: REMEMBER to have your original file back'd up when you do this.

Gio
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