Time Machine shows empty folder for external drive

[Kirkafur]

I back up my external drive dubbed ‘Extra Storage’ along with my internal drive to Time Machine. There’s plenty of room on the backup drive to have more than a full backup of each.
Within the Time Machine backup, there is what presents as an empty folder called ‘External Storage.’ When I use the Time Machine cosmic delirium interface no backups of that drive are accessible. However, even after reformatting the backup drive and completing an initial backup, pretty much exactly the expected space is taken up on the backup drive to account for the internal and external drives.

I don’t know what’s going on, and I can’t think of how to phrase it to find help via Google. Anyone else had this happen or have an idea what’s going on?

 

[ursamaior]

I'm in the same situation.

 

[gilby101]

When I use the Time Machine cosmic delirium interface no backups of that drive are accessible.

The cosmic delirium is pretty much unusable for me. But I never use it! Better to use Finder to explore your Time Machine disk. Like this where I have three disks backed up with TM:

Do you have something like that with your 'Extra Storage' below your macOS - Data disk.

 

[ursamaior]

Yes, but the difference is that my external drive (backuped, like bethSSD) is showed but empty (zero bytes).
This is on Mac mini M1 and Monterey 12.1

 

[mac_and_van]

@Kirkafur, @ursamaior , have you found a solution? I have the same issue here with a MBP 13" M1 under 11.6.1. It backups up the Internal SDD but the external one results in an empty folder. As the initial backup was very fast, it's impossible that the external data has been copied. Issue exists for a network share as well as for an locally connected USB drive.

I removed all backup disks, erased the USB drive, deleted the TimeMachine plist and recreated the backup. Same issue.

Maybe you already came along a solution? ?

Maybe I should migrate to Carbon Copy Cloner...

All the best
Chris

 

[Kirkafur]

No, I never did find an answer to this issue. However, I did go ahead and switch to Carbon Copy Cloner for backups, since it works pretty similarly with hourly snapshots.

 

[ursamaior]

Same for me.
No solution and so switched to CCC.

 

[mac_and_van]

Thanks a lot for your feedback! So I will configure CCC ?