Does Time Machine backup external drives?
10.30.2007 – 11:20 am | by paul
I have a question for anyone who has upgraded to Leopard, is using Time Machine, and has more than one external drive attached. Does Time Machine backup your other external drives, or just your internal drive?
Example: Let’s say you have an iMac with an external drive (A) attached containing all of your active files. You then attach another drive (B) to use as your Time Machine backup drive. Is Time Machine pulling files from Drive A?
I can’t seem to find the answer to this anywhere. One of the guys at the Apple store thought that TM only pulled from your internal drive, but he wasn’t sure. If this is true, than Time Machine just became totally unusable for me. All of my files are located on externals, including my iTunes and iPhoto libraries.
If anyone can shed some light on this it would be greatly appreciated.
UPDATE: Thanks to the comments by bernd and Dave, it looks like the answer is yes… Time Machine will pull from other external drives. I’m glad the Apple store guy was wrong. :)
UPDATE #2: According to this comment over at The Apple Blog, non Time Machine external drives are automatically put into the exclude list. If you want your external to be backed up, you need to open Time Machine and remove it from the list.
October 30th, 2007 at 11:44 am
let’s make it short: yes, this is possible.
October 30th, 2007 at 11:52 am
I have the same setup, 2 external drives, one for Time Machine, the other for iPhoto. Time Machine is backing up for me from the internal drive on my lowly iMac G5 original, and from the external drive that was not allocated to Time Machine. So the short answer is, it does what you want. The only thing it won’t do is backup data on the Time Machine drive to itself.
October 30th, 2007 at 11:52 am
Thanks for the reply’s. This is good news.
October 30th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
But it won’t pull from a networked drive, right? For instance, I want my iTunes on my ABS to be backed up - I’ll have to do this manually, correct?
November 6th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
I still can’t seem to get this to work. My Time Machine settings panel is not allowing me to exclude my second drive. This is a brand new MyBook drive (factory-formatted in Fat32); could the formatting type be the reason…?
November 6th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
KL - It just so happens I was reading this article about Time Machine and Fat32 when your comment came in. You may want to have a look.
November 6th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Thanks, Paul. Problem solved. It appears that one needs to reformat his or her second drive in MacOS Extended (Journaled) format before Time Machine can work with it. Most external drives ship using FAT32 formatting, a protocol ensuring both Mac and PC compatibility. Out of the box, these drives are ignored entirely by Time Machine.
I’m really quite surprised that this seems to be such an obscure topic. Your posted question was one of the only things I could find on the subject. One would think that more people would be tripped-up by this.
November 6th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
Glad to help, KL. I was actually coming back here to comment about this again. I scoured the Apple discussion boards and found the same answer. TM will ignore both FAT32 and NTFS. It will only read-form and write-to HFS+.
I was surprised too that there aren’t more people talking about this. I’ve had a hard time finding information.
November 7th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
This is the question that I’d like answered as well. I’m looking at an nfs mounted UFS-formatted home directory that is greyed out in Finder and Time Machine. I can select it to exclude it, but when I change a file in my home directory through Finder, Time Machine complains that the nfs mount is too big to backup.
This probably means that only HFS+ partitions are supported, because TM uses Apple’s /dev/fsevents. I really wish that Leopard had moved to ZFS and dropped HFS.
Isaac Vetter
January 22nd, 2008 at 5:57 pm
I tried what was mentioned where I reformatted an external drive as MAC OS Extended (journaled) and it still wont allow me to include it in my Time Machine backups. In the ‘exclude’ window it remains greyed out no matter what I try.
January 22nd, 2008 at 6:41 pm
RKG, I’m not going to be much help, as this is working for me just fine. I have heard that some brands of drives don’t work for some reason, but I don’t have any specifics. Have you looked at Apple’s Time Machine forums?
February 13th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Really lame question, but how do you open time machine. When I try it zooms into the sky screen with only choices being restore or cancel. I just want to open the application. If it saved external HD data will you see the drive (icon) data when you click on the most recent file?
February 13th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Anne Marie, The “sky screen” is the application. There’s nothing else to see. Simply select the file / folder that you want to restore, and click the “restore” button. Yes, the external HD will be visible in Time Machine.
See this video for an overview.
June 6th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
I have been able to get Time Machine to backup my external drive just fine, but I have noticed tonight that if I go into the Time Machine application to look at the backups, I do not see the backup of my external drive unless it is plugged in.
At first I thought perhaps it’s not actually backing it up and what I saw in Time Machine was the actual drive, not a backup, but when I go back in time, the data changes to reflect that it actually was backed up. Furthermore, the data size of the backups reflects both the internal and external drive having been back up.
So my question is this - what happens if I lose the external hard drive and need to recover the files from Time Machine? How will I do that without the external hard drive? Has anyone had any experience with this? I am thinking perhaps any external hard drive will result in it showing up, but I do not have another one to test it with. Any feedback on this would be greatly appreciated.
I really need to depend on the backup of my external drive being able to be recovered in the event that something happens to it (being stolen or broken for example), but I am nervous that the backup does not show up in Time Machine unless the actual drive is plugged in.
Thanks!
June 6th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
elisia, you can recover the files without the original external drive attached by simply browsing the contents of your Time Machine drive in the Finder (Not in Time Machine). Double-click on the drive you are backing up to and you’ll see a folder named, “Backups.backupdb”. In that folder will be a folder that has the same name as you computer. In that folder you’ll see a folder called, “Latest”. You can simply drag-and-drop files from the Latest folder to any location on your internal drive or a new external to restore them.
July 3rd, 2008 at 12:53 pm
I also think you can recover by plugging in your new (or let’s say a reformat of your original drive), as long as it has the same name. So, just name it the same and it will respond as if it was the old drive — even if the capacity etc. is different.
I used this approach to get Time Machine to clone a drive…
July 12th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Recently my boss installed Time Machine on my computer at work. He said it works by taking pictures every hour of what I’m doing and stores the information. Does this mean that whatever I’m doing, even if it’s personal or if I happen to be looking at my online blog say, it’ll record that? I know I sound like an evil employee, I’m really not but sometimes I have to do something else for just a minute at work to clear my mind. Thanks.
July 12th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Sam, that’s not really what Time Machine does. It makes an hourly backup of your files, but it in no way records what you are doing.
July 26th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Paul,thanks for the info. That’s good to know!
October 4th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Hi, for the first time today i have used time machine. I also wanted to back up an external firewire and also a usb drive that had my info on it. The comment earlier saying only the internal drive is automatically backed up is the “default” setting. You will notice that in the option settings “of back up”
your other drives will be visable, These are the drives that will NOT be backed up. If you “DO” want to also back them up: Highlight the each drive and then push the ” - ” button, they will then be taken out of the list of “not backed up drives”…. also I found time machine backed up very slowly and threw an error message when I daisy chained my firewire time machine” drive as the “second” drive in the daisy chain. I then changed the order of the drive and made it the “first in line” this seemed to sort the problem, good luck, Paul
October 6th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
I have two questions about what happens if you have an external drive that’s not always hooked up to your machine when Time Machine runs.
For example, say you have a MacBook, a big external Firewire drive, and a Time Capsule. You have set up Time Machine to backup the MacBook’s internal drive and the Firewire drive to the Time Capsule over your wireless network.
You hook everything up and run Time Machine a few times so you have a full backup. Then you unhook the Firewire drive and Time Machine runs a few more incremental backups. Then you hook up the Firewire drive again.
1) Will Time Machine still recognize that it should include the Firewire drive in your backup? Or will you have to manually remove it from the “exclude” list again?
2) Will Time Machine continue to incrementally backup the Firewire drive or force a full backup as if the whole thing were new? In other words, is Time Machine smart enough to look back at the last incremental backup of that particular drive? Or does it only check the current file structure against the last incremental backup of the whole system (when the Firewire drive wasn’t connected)?
October 6th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
M, I’m not absolutely positive, but I think Time Machine is smart enough to both, keep the external drive out of the exclude list, and only do incremental backups, even if it’s not always connected. Best way to know for sure is with a little testing. :)