[Yokohama]

I've just bought an ext. 2Tb hard drive for backing up. I've partitioned it into 3 disks: one for Work, one for a bootable disk, and one for general back-up of everything.

For the Work disk, I only want to back up my work files every hour, not the systems software, photos, iTunes etc. So I've used Options in TM and excluded those folders. But when it comes to backing up everything on the Mac at the end of the day in my General disk, I find that the selection of excluded folders is carried over to this disk.

Is there a way that I can "save" my selection of folders/files to be saved for each disk," so that I don't need to keep using Option? Also, any comments on this back-up strategy? Thanks.

[chabig]

My suggestion is keep your bootable partition small and use the rest of your 2TB for one large TM disk. Time Machine only backs up things that have changed, so you're primarily going to see TM backing up your work only. The photos and music won't be backed up every hour because they don't change hourly. Keep it simple.