[jonahgirl]

I have a user (graphic artist) with enormous amounts of data. For years I have used Silverlight to schedule backups (everytime he restarts) to a large external drive. He now has a shiny new mac pro due to the death of his G4 tower. I have restored all his files to the new machine and am juggling on what software to use to backup. Here are my choices:

Keep using Silverlight as it is easy to set up using the files already on the backup drive.
Use the backup app Data backup 3 that came with the backup drive that I never used.
Switch to Time Machine.

Now the question: I can't wipe his external drive to set up time machine. Is it possible to match what is already there? (I back up his home directory on the first drive and the entire contents of the second drive.

If you are wondering why I am considering it is because he doesn't restart all that often and sometimes he will get impatient and cancel the backup.

[JKT]

Time Machine could be used in conjunction with the data already on the drive (it will leave it untouched) and you can keep the same Silverlight back-up strategy if you want. It will just cause it to fill the drive faster as TM will eventually use up all free space left available to it.

However, I would recommend getting one drive for the Silverlight back-up and another for Time Machine as redundancy of back-ups to two different drives would be more effective. As it is a Mac Pro, you would only need to get another internal drive rather than an external and dedicate it to TM backups, which would keep the price down.