Time Machine problem

[edwardthefifth]

Hello, I have multiple hard drives connected to my Mac Mini:

A 250 gb drive that holds all my photos
a 500 gb drive that holds my music
a 1tb drive that holds my vidoes
The mini itself has only a 80gb hard drive

For time machine, I use 2tb hardrive, so there's more than enough space for everything. Luckily, I've never had to use time machine until now.

Today, when I plugged in my iphone, A message popped up that I needed to locate my iphoto library. Sure enough, I checked and the hard drive that holds my photos did not show up on my desktop. I turned the drive off and back on, and now I get a message that the disc is not readable by the computer.

I opened up Time Machine to confirm that an old image of the hard drive with the photos existed, but there's nothing on my Time Machine! I can go all the way back to August and I can't find the photo hard drive (video and music drives still exist). Is there something that I'm missing here? I know that I didn't exclude the photo hard drive from Time Machine, and I know that's it's been hooked up because I added photos within the last month or so.

Any help is appreciated, or else i've just lost 5 years of photos that I was certain I'd backed up.

 

[EmmEff]

If you do not see the folder at all, I'm afraid it hasn't been backed up.

I know hindsight is 20/20 but you should've checked the backup at least once to confirm it's working.

I thought the default behaviour was to exclude all external drives? I have 5 external drives on my Mac Pro and I've never told Time Machine to exclude them and they are not backed up automatically.

 

[Tomorrow]

I thought the default behaviour was to exclude all external drives?

I thought the same thing, although I can't say for sure.

 

[edwardthefifth]

Damn, I've no idea what happened then.

So, normally though, even if a hard drive goes out, time machine will still show the image of the hard drive via which I should be able to access the contents, right?

 

[EmmEff]

Damn, I've no idea what happened then.

So, normally though, even if a hard drive goes out, time machine will still show the image of the hard drive via which I should be able to access the contents, right?

No. You need to tell Time Machine to backup the drive. It'll show up in the Time Machine "Finder" view, but if it's not backed up, there will be no contents.

 

[edwardthefifth]

ok, so i think i'm actually going to be ok here.

to test things out, i ejected both my video and music hard drives. sure enough, when i opened up time machine, neither drive showed up in the left hand section of the finder.

however, when i clicked on the icon for my computer, 3 folders now show up: music, video, and photos. I clicked on the photo folder, inside was the iphoto icon, and when i clicked on that, a preview screen comes up that tells me my iphoto catalog is 30+gb. That sounds like the size of my collection. So now, how do I get this catalog off of time machine and into one of my other hard drives?

Just to make sure that I was thinking correctly, I clicked on one of the videos within the video folder on my time machine, and it played fine. So I expect that my photos will be fine as well.

 

[EmmEff]

however, when i clicked on the icon for my computer, 3 folders now show up: music, video, and photos. I clicked on the photo folder, inside was the iphoto icon, and when i clicked on that, a preview screen comes up that tells me my iphoto catalog is 30+gb. That sounds like the size of my collection. So now, how do I get this catalog off of time machine and into one of my other hard drives?

Using Finder: Browse to the "latest" folder on your Time Machine drive, and drag the iPhoto Library onto disk

Using iPhoto: Open iPhoto prior entering Time Machine and there will be options to restore photos.

 

[Fubar1977]

Time Machine automatically excludes external drives on my system (SL 10.6.6)