Time Machine and external drive

[dcmaccam]

Hi, I have been using Time Machine on my 2011 iMac with no problems. I now have a 2019 iMac and have Time Machine running on this.

I have an external SSD data drive containing my Lightroom Photo, video files and projects. My internal Fusion drive contain a few applications etc.
I am backing up both the internal drive and also the external SSD to a Thunderbolt connected Lacie HDD drive.

My question is if I do a full restore from a backup will it insist on wiping out both the internal drive and my data drive and thenrestore both. If so I am thinking of stopping the backing up of the SSD using Time Machine and just doing copy to another drive. Thus leaving Time Machine to take care of backing up only the system disk.

One other way may be to do the occasional backup of just the system drive by temporarily deselecting the SSD drive in Time Machine settings. Then doing a restore from that backup config won’t touch the SSD drive.

Anybody got any thought on this, Thanks

 

[adamlbiscuit]

Hi. Sorry this reply is late - you've probably found the answer by now.

As far as I'm aware, when you restore from a Time Machine backup that includes the boot volume and an external drive the Mac will ONLY restore the boot volume. That would suggest it'd leave the data on the external data disk alone.

With regards to the external drive backups, once you're back up and running you can access the external HD backups through the Time Machine interface or Finder. You can then manually copy the contents of the external drive backup to the desired location if need be.

I've never done it but I also have a setup where I have my photos and music libraries on an external disk, which is then backed up by Time Machine to another external disk. I was curious and so did some researching and the above is the gist of what I could find out.

 

[adamlbiscuit]

*double post deleted*