[camner]

I once learned the lesson of multiple backups when I accidently hosed both my main drive and my principal SD! backup drive (my idiocy...neither an SD! problem nor a hardware problem).

I'd like to be able to keep multiple archives of past backups. The problem is that as my data grows in size (principally images) so that my main drive now occupies nearly 250GB, keeping multiple 250GB backups takes lots of room.

So, I've been thinking about strategies for this, and I've come up with two:

1. Create a Sandbox with "shared users" only. If I understand what that will do, that will serve to back up everything on the drive other than the "users" folder. This can serve as a "system snapshot," and I can keep as many of these as I wish.

The only concern/question I have about this is how to restore. I THINK I should be able to restore this kind of snapshot to a Sandbox, but not to an underlying drive (or maybe I can, using the technique of "cloning back a Sandbox to a main drive").

Perhaps the best way to implement this strategy would be to make my Sandbox a "shared users" only sandbox, and then periodically make an "all files" backup of the Sandbox as a "system archive."

Will this work?

2. Take my Documents folder (or some of the subfolders) and move them off to a separate volume, then create aliases on my main drive. Then take a snapshot by cloning the entire drive (which will clone the aliases without resolving them). Restoring would mean simply cloning back.

I'm not sure I think it is a good idea to alias the Documents folder, as the system expects that to exists, I think.

My preference would be method 1, if it would work.

Thanks for your help...if I take this approach, I want to make sure I have a workflow that will work.