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Back up more than One HD in Time Machine?

blaklaybul

blaklaybul

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 29, 2007
167
0
New York City
I have a MBP, but I keep all of my pictures and movies on an external hard drive.

Under time machine options, excludes my external hard drive from backup, but doesnt give me the choice to include it.

The external is a 250GB western digital passport.

Can this be done?
 
yup yup yup

it can be done, just unexclude it. take it off the exclude list. Oh wait, are you talking about the actual drive that has your backups on it? no no no, you don't need to back that up to time machine it's already on that drive, if you backup your backup drive you'd have some sort of infinite loop, and tear the very fabric of the space time continueum
 
hah..

the thing is that the external isnt a backup. I do not have movies or pictures saved on my computers hard drive. They are all saved to the external.

Are you saying that time machine will keep my pictures and movies from before I moved them onto the Passport?

even months from now, they will all still be there?
 
yeah

if it's a seperate drive from the one your backing up to, then just remove it from the exclude list
 
strange

it really does sound to me LIKE THAT DRIVE YOU HAVE ALL YOUR PHOTOS AND STUFF ON IS THE SAME DRIVE YOU ARE USING TO DO YOUR TIME MACHINE BACKUP

oops caps lock
 
My understanding of your situation is:

- You have one external hard drive.
- You have data, movies or music, on this external hard drive.
- The external hard drive is also your Time Machine drive.
- You want to backup the data on the external drive via Time Machine.

If this is the case then I think the best way to accomplish this is to create a new partition on your external hard drive and segregate your data into one partition and your Time Machine backup into the other.

I haven't done this myself so take this suggestion with a grain of salt.
 
They are separate drives!

Sorry about the confusion...

My time machine drive is a 500GB Western Digital My Book
My external with photos and movies is a 250GB WD passport

I wish to back up the data on the 250 onto my 500gb drive.
 
This is a silly question and forgive me if it sounds insulting, but when you say the minus is greyed out, you are clicking on the drive you wish to exclude before you attempt to click on the minus, right? Sorry if that's obvious, but I didn't want to leave it unaddressed in case it was the problem.
 
i am in the same boat. I have 2 externals: 1 being used as a time machine drive and the other is the passport for movies music whatever. I can not add the drive to the time machine back or take it off the list because it is grayed out. Is this because its formatted fat32?
 
same problem here using a "data" disk format in Fat32.

Anybody found a solution for this issue?

Do I need to reformat my "data disk" (not the TM backup disk) with other format than Fat32.

I preffer to use Fat32 so I can share my disk with other Windows machines.

EDIT:
I found this here:
http://www.onedigitallife.com/2007/10/30/does-time-machine-backup-external-drives/

"KL Says:
November 6th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Thanks, Paul. Problem solved. It appears that one needs to reformat his or her second drive in MacOS Extended (Journaled) format before Time Machine can work with it. Most external drives ship using FAT32 formatting, a protocol ensuring both Mac and PC compatibility. Out of the box, these drives are ignored entirely by Time Machine.

I’m really quite surprised that this seems to be such an obscure topic. Your posted question was one of the only things I could find on the subject. One would think that more people would be tripped-up by this."

Is this true? I would like to keep the FAT32 format for my Data Disk.
 
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