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drtanz

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 27, 2012
58
0
I have an external drive hooked up to my Macbook air, and have Time Machine doing backups to Time Capsule. How can I verify that the external drive is indeed being backed up? I have some important data on this external drive and want to be double sure that it is indeed being backed up.
 
Connect to it, and then go to the shortcut that says latest backup (or something to that effect)
 
I don't think Time machine backs up external drives. If you open time machine preferences options you may see the external drive(s) in the excluded list and I don't think there is a way to include the drive.

I use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up my external drives to the Time Capsule drive.
 
I don't think Time machine backs up external drives. If you open time machine preferences options you may see the external drive(s) in the excluded list and I don't think there is a way to include the drive.

I use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up my external drives to the Time Capsule drive.

That's totally incorrect.
 
I don't think Time machine backs up external drives.
Why do you say that? It does back up external drives. I set my TM backup to exclude external disks, so it does see them and want to back them up
 
You know thats right for drives formatted in Mac extended journaled. You can't seem to include drives in a RAID enclosure in a time machine backup... which is what I have and the source of my confusion. Good thing we have an extended community to catch those details. TM won't backup my FAT32 formatted SD card either.

So how does the OP double check that his external drive is indeed backing up?
 
So how does the OP double check that his external drive is indeed backing up?

To double check you could just open a file/folder on the external then start the Time Machine star field interface and scroll back in time to make sure the file/folder selected is shown in the backup set.
 
You know thats right for drives formatted in Mac extended journaled. You can't seem to include drives in a RAID enclosure in a time machine backup... which is what I have and the source of my confusion. Good thing we have an extended community to catch those details. TM won't backup my FAT32 formatted SD card either.

So how does the OP double check that his external drive is indeed backing up?

Is your RAID array a NAS or DAS? My DAS (Pegasus R4) is backed up by TM just fine. I do not think that TM will back up a NAS (but I've never tried).

/Jim
 
Is your RAID array a NAS or DAS? My DAS (Pegasus R4) is backed up by TM just fine. I do not think that TM will back up a NAS (but I've never tried).

/Jim

Its a OWC Guardian Maximus DAS, two drives hardware mirrored. I've used both USB3 and Firewire interfaces with it.
 
Its a OWC Guardian Maximus DAS, two drives hardware mirrored. I've used both USB3 and Firewire interfaces with it.

With USB/FW... it should be a DAS.

My system defaults to exclude all external drives from Time Machine Backup. However, by going in to TM setup, and removing the exclusion... then the DAS becomes part of the backup set for TM.

/Jim
 
With USB/FW... it should be a DAS.

My system defaults to exclude all external drives from Time Machine Backup. However, by going in to TM setup, and removing the exclusion... then the DAS becomes part of the backup set for TM.

/Jim

Yes my system lists the drives in the exclusion list, but does not allow allow these drives to be removed from the list (they are grayed out).
 
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