Timemachine and external storage?

[kaelell]

A quick question on time machine backups.


If were to go for the 1TB fusion drive and move my Music & Photos folder to an external drive, can time machine be set up to include the contents of the external drive in when backing up ?


thanks

 

[flatfoot]

A quick question on time machine backups.


If were to go for the 1TB fusion drive and move my Music & Photos folder to an external drive, can time machine be set up to include the contents of the external drive in when backing up ?


thanks

It will do so by default. You can also configure what's supposed to be backed up in the Time Machine system preference pane.

 

[kaelell]

i found some information on this on apples support pages, apparently by default its set to exclude external drives you need to change this and the second condition is that is must be Mac OS extended formatted.

 

[Weaselboy]

i found some information on this on apples support pages, apparently by default its set to exclude external drives you need to change this and the second condition is that is must be Mac OS extended formatted.

Correct. Just to be clear though, you will need to have the music on one external drive and the TM backup on a second external. I think that is your plan, but I was not clear from the wording of your post.

 

[bflowers]

it shouldnt be a problem, as in the time machine preferences, you select what to exclude. I think external drives are added by default, but can be removed. I'll go plug in my TM drive and another drive to check and report back.

 

[kaelell]

Correct. Just to be clear though, you will need to have the music on one external drive and the TM backup on a second external. I think that is your plan, but I was not clear from the wording of your post.

thanks, thats correct , that is my intention

 

[bflowers]

Yes, they do automatically end up in the Exclude list, but can be removed. Even the separate partition from the drive that Time Machine backs up to can be removed from the list, although that is pointless.

The next question is, would you really want your iTunes library, which is already on an external, backing up to another external? Does it change often enough to include it in Time Machine? I manually back up mine to another drive, and don't slow down Time Machine by making it index all those files.

 

[kaelell]

Yes, they do automatically end up in the Exclude list, but can be removed. Even the separate partition from the drive that Time Machine backs up to can be removed from the list, although that is pointless.

The next question is, would you really want your iTunes library, which is already on an external, backing up to another external? Does it change often enough to include it in Time Machine? I manually back up mine to another drive, and don't slow down Time Machine by making it index all those files.

you are possibly right about the music, I have it backed up via Itunes Match anyhow. Just dont fancy manually downloading it all in case of an "incident"
But after reading a few more threads on here, I am thinking of forgetting time machine and trying Carbon Copy Cloner.

 

[bflowers]

I can't comment on Carbon Copy, but I have used Time Machine for full recoveries. I guess I could also try out Seagate's included software, as I have two of their 3Tb drives. Music and Movies I manage myself, transferring the new stuff to a separate drive, and excluding them from TM. That is partially because I have a MacBook with only a 250Gb drive. When my new iMac shows up in a couple weeks, with a 1.1Tb Fusion drive, things might change a bit or a lot...

Anyway, good luck!