iMac - Backing up the back up...

[AnonymousBird]

I have an iMac and am reviewing what and how we back up. I intend to back up both phone and pad to the Mac, then I am setting up time machine to back it all up to my external drive bought from Apple for the job.

Am I right in thinkng therefore, that the Mac back ups of phone and pad will also be on external drive? Seems obvious to me that they will be but being a bit non techy there is just this teensy little doubt in my mind.

And on the subject of back ups, once it is all in one place on this external drive, does this mean I can plug that drive in anywhere and see my back up or can I only stick it into another Mac product? If I only wanted to pick out, say, the iPad back up on the Mac back up, are you able to do that!?

Grateful for tips. Thanks.

I have no idea of phone back ups (I use I cloud to back up my phone and iPad) but a wee catutionry tale:

My iMac hard drive failed.

It was discovered then that my time machine had failed too.

All our photos from our honey moon, years of holidays - gone.

I now back everything up to time machine and have an external back up with Carbonote just in case. As Apple told me in store - you must back up your back up.

Carbonite sorry.

I'm of no help but I'm watching the thread with interest.

I bought a time machine a few months back and have never succeeded in setting it up correctly.

Oh digger. Poor you. Our hard drive half failed, in that it wouldn't work in the Mac but we could access it. but we also had our photos backed up and when getting a new hard drive, they could still get everything off the old drive into the new one. Which is why, now I want it all in one place in case we aren't lucky enough to be able to migrate off a broken drive in future.

I am setting up Time Machine today. My friend said she literally just clicked "on" in settings and plugged in the external drive and let it run to back up. If there is more to it I will let you know.

Mac hard drives fail basically because you have a machine which is 3,4 or 5 years old and it is designed to run an earlier version of OSX. We are then encouraged/ semi forced by Apple to upgrade the operating system and older machines can't cope and the drives simply go bust as a result.