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kirkbross

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 6, 2007
666
22
Los Angeles
I'm sure this is answered somewhere, but does Time Machine backup any mounted drive when it does a backup, or only the internal drives, or only the boot?
 
I have the same question. For weeks my backup hangs up at 294.89 GB and freezes. I have my backup drive and three other in my 2008 Mac Pro. After weeks of it not working I decided to just backup my main drive - guess what - it has 294.89 GB on it. My total backup should be 426.56 GB.

So, why is Time Machine not backing up drives 2 & 3?

Denny O
 
From where I'm sitting, it backs up; Main HD (you'd hope!) and other my HD bays, but not 1. my XP drive (this is because it's not readable FAT or whatever), 2. my external drive.
 
All four of my internal drives back up. The TM control panel can be used to exclude drives. That panel should list the drives TM sees.
 
Also bear in mind that if you're using Parallels as well as Boot Camp Parallels will "see" the Time Machine backup of XP (or Vista) and will refuse to run - it will give you an error message to the effect that you have a non-standard Boot Camp partition. It will work if you unplug the external Time Machine disk but I asked their tech support about this and this was their reply.

To solve the problem please follow these steps:
1) Please open Applications->Utilities->Terminal run "diskutil list"
command. From the output you may know which partition is occupied by
Windows (the one where XP resides and not the Time Machine disk).
2) Open .pvs file that is located in Mac HD -> Users -> Your login name
-> Documents -> Parallels file with TextEdit.
Look for a line containing something like "Disk 0:0 image = Boot
Camp;disk0s3".
The X value in 'disk0sX' is the number of Windows partition.
3) Change the value for the one you had in output - from line 1) or (if it does not have a value) add 'disk0sX'.

Alan
 
All four of my internal drives back up. The TM control panel can be used to exclude drives. That panel should list the drives TM sees.

Time Machine doesn't give me the option to choose which drive to back up. I have 4 internal drives (1 was for Time Machine). Unfortunately, Time Machine wanted to back up the other 3 drives (1 x 1TB, 2 x 500GB). The 500GB backup drive doesn't have room.

Ended up turning off Time Machine, and use Carbon Copy Cloner for my backups. Would've preferred to use Time Machine if it had the option to choose specific drives to backup.
 
Time Machine doesn't give me the option to choose which drive to back up. I have 4 internal drives (1 was for Time Machine). Unfortunately, Time Machine wanted to back up the other 3 drives (1 x 1TB, 2 x 500GB). The 500GB backup drive doesn't have room.

Ended up turning off Time Machine, and use Carbon Copy Cloner for my backups. Would've preferred to use Time Machine if it had the option to choose specific drives to backup.

Just tell Time Machine which drives you don't want backed up. Reversed logic, same effect. I had 4 drives at one time, and the 4th drive for Time Machine only backed up #1 and #2. I just dropped #3 into the excluded list of Time Machine.
 
Just tell Time Machine which drives you don't want backed up. Reversed logic, same effect. I had 4 drives at one time, and the 4th drive for Time Machine only backed up #1 and #2. I just dropped #3 into the excluded list of Time Machine.
Ahh...should've figured that out. That's what happens when your so used to checking and unchecking options. Thanks for the info.
 
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