[Urgent] Can you use Time Machine to backup a non-OS drive?

[yalag]

I'm a few hours away from selling my mac. I have a internal drive here storing some media and document files. Can I use the time machine technology to backup this drive to an external drive and then somehow restore it later? I don't want to do a simple copy and paste of all files, I'm afraid that I might miss some system files or other application specific stuff.

Thanks!

 

[soco]

I'm pretty sure Time Machine is an OS X only feature and only works on OS X installations.

 

[yalag]

Sorry I do have OSX installed. But what I want to backup is not the OS drive, but a second drive in my mac that stores non OS files.

 

[soco]

Sorry I do have OSX installed. But what I want to backup is not the OS drive, but a second drive in my mac that stores non OS files.

Indeed. So the issue is going to be the fact that OS X is not installed and running on the non-OS drive.

 

[yalag]

What procedure should I take instead in this situation? A simple save disk as image from the disk utility?

 

[chown33]

What procedure should I take instead in this situation? A simple save disk as image from the disk utility?

Carbon Copy Cloner is free (shareware).

 

[Urusai89]

Carbon copy cloner should work, but I don't understand how you could miss 'system files' if it's a drive for just documents and stuff. What system files could be there?

CCC just copies everything from one drive to another, and can even clone your entire system. The clone works so well you can even boot the computer from it. You should be able to copy a non-OS drive's contents to another drive no problem using CCC.

 

[sjinsjca]

TimeMachine will black up an external drive plugged into the USB or FireWire port of my Macbook Pro. I do have to tell Time Machine to NOT exclude the drive-- TM defaults to excluding.

The external drive has only files, not OS information. It is, however, formatted as an OS X Extended (journaled) disk. This may be a prerequisite for Time Machine.

Having backed up both the external drive and my internal drive, I can restore them using Time Machine at a later date, to a new machine or to a new disk. I've done so many times.

I hope this answers your questions.