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Time Machine - Backup NTFS Disk

K

kolax

macrumors G3
Original poster
Mar 20, 2007
9,181
115
I have my Time Machine disk (formatted HFS+), and another portable hard drive formatted NTFS with a bunch of media on it. I chose NTFS because I use it with my Mac as well as friend's Windows machines, and it was easier to enable NTFS writing on my Mac than to enable HFS+ write on every Windows machine I may come across.

However, NTFS drives don't play nice with Time Machine. From Googling around, I've come across posts of people wanting to use an NTFS drive as a Time Machine drive. I don't want to do that, I just simply want Time Machine to include an NTFS drive in its backup.

Is there any way to enable this?

I was looking at doing an rsync instead, however I'd rather Time Machine be used seeing as I use it already for my Mac backup.
 
No.

TM is very reliant on the HFS+ disk format to identify which files have changed and need backing up.

If you want to backup a non-HFS disk, you need another solution, such as rsync, as you mention.
 
Go to system preferences -> time machine
click options on the bottom left (drive has to be connected)

does it show up in that list?
 
I would like to suggest you try another backup solution. There are many available in the market. I am using iProtecMac for my Mac book. It is very user friendly softwear for Mac backup and restore. You can try it.
 
Would TM play better with ExFAT? Of course, switching to that would require backing up the media and formatting the disk. ExFAT would enable writing on Windows and Mac without any extra applications, as would FAT32 (though that introduces a size limit of 4 GB for a single file).
 
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