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Washac

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Jul 2, 2006
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I had time Machine set up to do backups of my boot disk, but now I want to set it up to do backups
of my storage drive, how do I go about this ?
 
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I had time Machine set up to do backups of my boot disk, but now I want to set it up to do backups
of my storage drive, how do I go about this ?
If its an external drive it may be excluded.
Go to the Systems Setting-> Time Machine
1755684751938.png


Click on Options and make sure that your storage drive is not showing up in the exclusion list. For instance, my data drive is, as its an external drive.
1755684773416.png
 
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my data drive is [excluded], as it's an external drive.
So if it fails suddenly tomorrow, what will happen?

Every file that you want to keep needs to be on 2 separate devices -- at least.

I've literally just been replying to a thread on another forum where someone was asking how to recover data from an SSD, because it had just failed, and they had no backup.

"Files with no backup are waiting to be lost."
 
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The external disk must also be in APFS or Mac OS (Extended) format in order for Time Machine to back it up. I see a lot of external disks using exFAT, sometimes because they need cross-compatibility with Windoze and other times because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
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Cool. I'd rather annoy everyone by saying "Make sure you've got a backup" than by saying "Ha ha -- should've had a backup".
 
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