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Please help me configure my Time Machine USB drive

P

petalino

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 21, 2010
224
25
I am a photographer and an owner of a small business.

I keep all my photo files and my business files on separate USB drives.
I also have a music collection on another USB drive.

So, I just decided to buy a large single 8TB Seagate Backup Plus HD, which I plan to use exclusively for backup of the entire Imac and the connected individual USB drives. I will use Time Machine to do automatic backups.

My question is how to configure the Backup Drive.
Should I leave it as one large volume, or configure it to have several smaller volumes, each of them corresponding with the individual external USB drives??

I should note that the individual drives have a certain size today, but in the future might outgrow its capacity, forcing me to use larger new drives for same group of file types (Business, Photo and Music).

At this point I may have only 5TB of external storage drives total.

Imac 2013 with 3 external USB drives and 1TB internal Fusion HD.

According to the instruction booklet if used as a Time Machine drive, the Seagate needs to be configured for a Mac by downloading their Paragon Mac Driver.
At this point when I connect the drive to my Imac, it does mount and shows Start Here Mac App and Start Here Win App. So far I have not yet started playing with it.

Any thoughts?
 
I would leave the drive as one large partition, and just create folders for the individual USB drives you wish to backup. It will be easier to manage down the road.
 
I wasn't actually aware that Time Machine has the capability to backup drives other than your main drive. I could be wrong, but that's how I understand it. That said, once you've created a time machine backup (I'm not sure what your Paragon Mac Drive does by the way, but it might be for speed optimization ... maybe) on your 8 TB Seagate, you should have a directory structure on the drive that looks like the following:

/Backups.backupdb/[Your Computer Name]/[Various backups]

If you drop your external drives files onto the top level root directory, next to Backups.backupdb, you shouldn't have any issues with backing up your main drive. Keep in mind that Time Machine will not automatically pull files from your flash drives onto your backup drive (to my knowledge), as you will need to overwrite those or add to them as needed manually.
 
Thanks, Lunder.

Can I actually tell Time Machine to backup a particular drive to a folder which I would create on the backup drive?
Does this not happen automatically? TM would create a folder with the name of the backed up drive?


Also, is it better to format the Seagate drive using my IMac (without the use of Paragon), or should I use Paragon instead?


Here is what the Paragon download website says:

This driver provides write access for Seagate external drives in Mac OS without having to reformat.
[doublepost=1516130864][/doublepost]
SecuritySteve said:
If you drop your external drives files onto the top level root directory, next to Backups.backupdb, you shouldn't have any issues with backing up your main drive. Keep in mind that Time Machine will not automatically pull files from your flash drives onto your backup drive (to my knowledge), as you will need to overwrite those or add to them as needed manually.
Click to expand...

Steve, I am not sure what you are talking about in the quote above. Can you try to translate it into "street talk"?
 
Leave your backup drive as a single volume ... Time machine can only process one backup list.

You should then open "Time Machine Preferences" and select the "Options" button. You will see a list of excluded drives which, by default, will probably contain your external drives. Simply select each drive and use the "-" button to remove the drive from the excluded-list so it will be included in the Time Machine backup ... then "Save" the new configuration. Now your primary drive and all the external connected drives will be included in the hourly Time Machine updates to your new backup drive. Do not remove your backup TM drive from the list.

Your TM backup drive should ideally be 1.5 to 2 times the size of what you wish to backup, as it maintains versioning history as long as free space exists, so your 8TB drive should be fine for now.


-howard
 
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petalino said:
Steve, I am not sure what you are talking about in the quote above. Can you try to translate it into "street talk"?
Click to expand...
Essentially, you can drag and drop the files onto the Time Machine backup drive from your flash drives after you've set up Time Machine for your computer's main drive. You will need to do this every so often because it won't be automatically done.
 
SecuritySteve said:
I wasn't actually aware that Time Machine has the capability to backup drives other than your main drive. I could be wrong, but that's how I understand it. That said, once you've created a time machine backup (I'm not sure what your Paragon Mac Drive does by the way, but it might be for speed optimization ... maybe) on your 8 TB Seagate, you should have a directory structure on the drive that looks like the following:

/Backups.backupdb/[Your Computer Name]/[Various backups]

If you drop your external drives files onto the top level root directory, next to Backups.backupdb, you shouldn't have any issues with backing up your main drive. Keep in mind that Time Machine will not automatically pull files from your flash drives onto your backup drive (to my knowledge), as you will need to overwrite those or add to them as needed manually.
Click to expand...

Yes you can. The original Time Machine backed up only into external drives at one point. That is why Apple sold Time Capsules.
 
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