I use time machine to backup my mac hard drive. I use a external hard drive to save all my photos and videos. I want to backup them to another external hard drive. Is it possible to do this with time machine? Or is there another way? Thanks teqmter
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Time Machine Question
- Thread starter teqmter
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I have the same setup. I do not add anything to the external drive that does the Time Machine backup. I do know that when I moved to a new iMac in May 2017, I loaded my files from the Time Machine backup and my 33,000 photos showed up without a problem.
If your photos and videos are on the main drive and Time Machine backs up that drive, then they're already backed up.
If you want to make a separate Time Machine backup of just your photos and videos, presumably all in your Pictures and Movies folders, then Time Machine can do that, too, it's just annoying.
There are two simpler ways, both of which involve getting a new external drive.
1 copy your Pictures and Movies folders over to the external drive by hand. This will take time, you'll have to remember to periodically re-copy the folders and either merge or replace the folder contents as you wish, and will rapidly become annoying, though not as annoying as using Time Machine for a separate backup.
2 get Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! or similar. It is trivial to set up copy utilities like those to copy just the files/folders you want, and to copy any changes and just the changes, and to do it at a specific time, such as 02:00 in the morning while you're asleep. That's what I do.
I second Panthera's suggestion to try either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper for the second backup.
Either of the above will create a FULLY BOOTABLE cloned backup of your internal drive.
Everything will be "right there" in POFF (plain ol' finder format).
Just connect the backup, and it will mount on the desktop and be accessible as would any other drive.
Both CCC and SD are FREE to download and try for 30 days.
If you don't like the results, just erase it and you're "out no money".
I would not rely on or trust Time Machine.
But... that's just me.
Either of the above will create a FULLY BOOTABLE cloned backup of your internal drive.
Everything will be "right there" in POFF (plain ol' finder format).
Just connect the backup, and it will mount on the desktop and be accessible as would any other drive.
Both CCC and SD are FREE to download and try for 30 days.
If you don't like the results, just erase it and you're "out no money".
I would not rely on or trust Time Machine.
But... that's just me.
If I understand you have two external drives (?)... one for TM and the other for photos and videos. If you want to backup the second drive with TM, just go to the TM settings in System Prefs and remove that external drive from the excluded list where it will have been placed by default. Then the second drive with your photos and videos will be included in the TM backup.
Not exactly... but you could go to the TM settings and exclude a lot of the data folder like Photos, Music, and Documents and get it down to where it mostly just backs up the OS and your settings without all that personal data.
ahh... i see, thanks for that.
is time machine must be stored or done by external drive? or i can do back up on my own ssd?
You need to have it on an external drive so the data is backed up in the event the internal SSD fails.
Correct, but it depends if you are backing up to prevent against disk failure or just for file versioning. (where backup to the same drive is perfectly acceptable).
I would assume most of use several backup disks for mission critical data. Time machine handles this well.