David Chiu

This 1.5TB ioSafe drive is fire-resistant to 1550 degrees, can be submerged in 10ft of water for 3 days, includes data recovery service, can be bolted to the floor, runs quietly and has cool lights on the front plate.

One of my Time Machine backup drives was recently knocked off the top of my wife’s MacPro tower and crashed onto the floor. Miraculously, the drive is still readable but OS/X says the disk is damaged and won’t let me write to it. Then the very next day I happened to be reading Gizmodo and saw the article on the ioSafe SSD. It’s a bit pricey because it’s a SSD but I decided to check out the ioSafe website. That’s when I saw that they carried linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=B001VKKZHQ&adid=0B5X1DW8CVWYED3NQTD3&”>non-SSD products as well – for a much more affordable price. So I bought the 1.5TB version. It comes pre-formatted as NTFS so I just used Disk Utility to reformat it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). The next trick I wanted to accomplish was moving two different Time Machine backups from two different drives onto the ioSafe drive. I thought I could just copy the backup folders onto the new drive, but according to different sources on the internet this won’t work properly. Instead people suggest using Super Duper, Carbon Copy Cloner or Disk Utility to move a Time Machine backup from one drive to another. After spending an hour trying to use Disk Utility to copy the old Time Machine disk I gave up. I decided that I was fine with starting a new time machine backup for both machines on the new ioSafe drive. So now my Time Machine backups can survive if disaster strikes.