External Drive History

[inhalexhale1]

I know you can choose to include/exclude external drives in Time Machine backups.

Is there a way to see what external drives were connected to the Mac at the time of a given backup, if those drives were on the exclude list? Just to be clear, I'm not looking for the data (since that drive was excluded), just evidence it was connected to the Mac at the time of the backup.

If Time Machine includes a system report that would work.

Thanks!

 

[Brian33]

The answer appears to be "no." I poked around in my Time Machine backups and there is a hidden file listing the exclusions for each backup (each "snapshot"). However, from what I see, while it does list the folders I've excluded from TM backups, it does not list the two external drives (volumes) that were connected to my Mac at the time of the backup, even though they were in fact excluded.

Those two drives are shown in the System Preferences-->Time Machine-->Options window (because by default external drives are added to the that exclusions list), but again, they do not appear in the hidden ".exclusions.plist" file for the backup.

I also looked into the hidden ".Backup.log" file, and it does not appear to contain what you're looking for, either. I think you're out of luck...

 

[inhalexhale1]

The answer appears to be "no." I poked around in my Time Machine backups and there is a hidden file listing the exclusions for each backup (each "snapshot"). However, from what I see, while it does list the folders I've excluded from TM backups, it does not list the two external drives (volumes) that were connected to my Mac at the time of the backup, even though they were in fact excluded.

Those two drives are shown in the System Preferences-->Time Machine-->Options window (because by default external drives are added to the that exclusions list), but again, they do not appear in the hidden ".exclusions.plist" file for the backup.

I also looked into the hidden ".Backup.log" file, and it does not appear to contain what you're looking for, either. I think you're out of luck...

Thanks for looking into this.

I'm guessing the folders that were excluded are what you selected on the main drive, and wouldn't include folders that are on the external drive.

 

[Brian33]

I'm guessing the folders that were excluded are what you selected on the main drive, and wouldn't include folders that are on the external drive.

As it turns out, I had two folders on my main (boot) drive excluded, and two folders on an external drive excluded. All four folders were listed in the '.exclusions.plilst' file for each backup. Seems odd that the external drives themselves are't listed, but that is how it works on my machine, anyway. (Forgot to say: I'm running Mojave on this Mac.)