Does Time Machine backup external drives?
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.
54 Comments to Does Time Machine backup external drives?
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let’s make it short: yes, this is possible.
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.
Thanks for the reply’s. This is good news.
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?
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…?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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?
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.
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!
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.
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…
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.
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.
Paul,thanks for the info. That’s good to know!
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
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)?
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. :)
M: Did you ever resolve your question about TM backing up external hard drives that may not always be connected to your computer?
Hi,
I bought a 1TB external drive, thinking I could use TM to backup both my Mac and the 1TB external drive. Then I just read somewhere that TM will backup multiple drives but not the one TM is backing up on.
Is there anyway TM can backup only its own drive?
Ian – No, there isn’t a way to do that, because it would pretty much defeat the purpose. The original files and the backup would be on the same drive. If the drive dies, you would lose both. The whole idea behind making a backup is to have the data in two different places, incase one dies.
what if i make a partition?
Ian – that one I’m not sure about. You can definitely use a single partition (of a larger drive) for your backup, but I don’t know if TM will back up the other partitions on that same drive. But again, if that did work… your originals and backup would be on the same drive, so if it dies you would lose everything. Your best solution is to get a second external drive.
thank you. =)
hi,
My situation is slightly different. The TM backup drive is a Time Capsule (drive B in the example above).
My external drive is connected to this TC over the USB port (drive A).
Can I use TM to backup my Iphoto library stored on “A” onto the time capsule (B).
The drive does not show up in “exclude” window. I guess it acts more or less as a NAS.
thanks
rene – I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure TM can’t do that. You’re external drive (drive A) would have to be physically connected to your Mac in order for TM to back it up to the Time Capsule. I think TM works this way to avoid a bunch or redundant backups… For instance, if you had 5 macs on your network that all had your drive A mounted, TM by default would try to back it up from all 5 machines. To avoid this, TM ignores network volumes.
Do you have the drive connected to your Time Capsule because multiple macs need to access it? If so, you could connect the drive to one of the macs, and then activate file sharing on that mac. The other macs would be able to see it, and TM would back it up from the mac it’s connected to. It’s not as convenient as having the drive attached to the Time Capsule, because that mac would have to be on in order for the others to see the drive, but it may work for you.
Thanks for the feedback. I have “only” 1 Mac(book), so the purpose of connecting to TC is to be able to freely move around and access data everywhere wirelessly, instead of being forced to drag a disk around, or always sit at the desk (=luxury problem)
I guess I will then need to use Synk or similar to do this for me. No problem on itself: TM to backup the laptop, Synk to backup the library and other external files.
About time machine and external discs: for me it seems that time machine makes a full back up every time I plug my external disc to my computer. I have just made a full back up of both computer and external, then unplugged the external for a couple of hours and now it’s backing up 250 giga information…. exactly the amount of gigas that I have on my external!! damn! seems apple wireless components are really one step from being perfect but still not state of the art!!
I have a slightly different question: will Time Machine backup (to my network-attached Time Capsule) any always-mounted *internal* but non-boot drives inside my Mac Pro? I keep my data on a separate internal drive to obviate permissions issues between different users of this machine.
someone stole my macbook pro this week. i have now bought a new macbook pro and restored successfully from my time machine / capsule. That’s the good news…
I KNOW that i was backing up my external hard drive – a LaCie 320GB.
However… bad news, I can’t seem to find any reference to the LaCie on the restore / on the time capusle.
Can anyone please help (I have nine years of photos on the drive!)? Anyone know how to find the drive’s back up. I saw Ian Teapot’s comment above about buying the same drive and it will respond the same as the previous drive. Does anyone know if this is true?
Please let me know.
Charlie, That’s such a bummer that your Macbook was stolen.
I’m a little confused, was your 320GB Lacie drive stolen as well? I’m assuming so since you’re asking about restoring it.
I’m not sure about the buying of another drive and having Time Machine see it as if it were the original, but you should be able to see the backups on your Time Capsule. Mount your Time Capsule as a drive in the Finder (it should be listed under “SHARED” in the sidebar of every Finder window.) On the mounted drive you’ll see a disc image of your backup, it should be named with the name of your computer, followed by a bunch of numbers, with the extension “sparsebundle”. Double-clicking on the sparsebundle will mount it as a volume. Inside you should see everything that Time Machine has backed up. At the bottom of the list is a folder called, “Latest”. Go into that folder and you should see a folder for your old Lacie (if TM was backing it up).
Let me know if this works. Good luck!
yes the lacie was stolen as well.
i tried your solution and it worked fine. thanks so much.
Hey,
just restored a new MBP from Time Machine…was flawless.
I only had to re-enter SN#’s for FCP and ARD.
I have external drive 1TB that I use for storage, that is not included on my Time Machine hd (400gb)
Can I do a Time Machine backup for just the external drive, and not include the actual internal drive??
I can use Time Machine to backup a NTSF formated hard drive. I have installed NTFS for MAC OS X from Paragon Software (http://www.paragon-software.com/fr/home/ntfs-mac/). Very transparent and work like a charm.
SD
HI
i have the above setup… but my drive A is a 500GB Buffalo NAS (wireless, on the same network as my Macbook).
Is it possible to make TM include this in the backup?
SR
I have two external storage drives – one is a 2TB Western Digital and the other is a 1.5TB IoSafe. I wish to run Timemachine on the IoSafe and backup both the IMac and the Western Digital Drive to it. While the IoSafe is formatted for Mac, I can not seem to get Timemachine to now recognize the Western Digital drive to backup. The Western Digital drive up until now has been the drive that I had the Timemachine resident on.
Let me know if you have thoughts on how to make this all work.
Thanks.
CC
@Chris – Just to be clear, are you saying that when you go into the Time Machine preferences and click on “Options…” that the WD drive is in the list of items NOT to back up… and you can’t remove it from the list? If so, does your WD drive still have a Time Machine backup on it?
Hello – thanks Paul. I have resolved the issue. The WD drive had the TM app running while I was trying to config the IoSafe drive to be the principle TM drive. So once I changed over TM to the IoSafe drive as the principle, it then showed the WD in the exclusion listing (for which I was able to remove.)
Thanks for everyone’s assistance!
Cheers!
Hi there,
I am trying to backup my external hard-drive using time machine, onto a second external hard-drive.
I removed the drive through the Options panel (to not be excluded), it is still attached to the computer, and I left it all running overnight to complete the first backup.
When I checked it this morning, the only drive that Time Machine has backed up is my internal drive. It hasn’t backed up anything from the other external.
Any ideas why it is doing this?
Thanks!
@Cathy – Do you know if the external drive you’re trying to backup is formatted in either FAT32 or NTFS? Time machine won’t backup drives with these types of formatting. There’s more information about this in the earlier comments on this post.
To check your drives formatting:
1. launch Disk Utility (it’s in your Utilities folder)
2. select the volume (the drive name) in the left side of the window
3. the formatting will be displayed in the bottom portion of the window
If the drive is formatted with FAT32 or NTFS, you’ll have to reformat it in order for Time Machine to back it up. This is an easy task in Disk Utility, but you’ll need another external drive to temporarily copy your files to while you reformat your main drive (formatting will erase the drive).
Ah..damn! That’s the issue…thanks so much for your help. Now, I’m off to move files around for the umpteenth time. I’m sure it’ll all be worth it once it’s done.
Thanks once again.
hi Paul
i was very interested in your posts. it s true that apple discussions deoen st mention this problem very extnsively. i have same set-up: mac book, 2 ext HD attached (Maxtor 300 GB, Fujitsu 250 GB) and wireless Time Capsule which is used by Time Machine for back up (2TB). Now with the first HD (Maxtor), i find it in the option list of time machine but i can t exclude it becaue the -button is greyed out. However the other one (Fujitsu) is showing up as well but this one i can exclude by pusing the – button because it s white. I dont really understand why it s different for different HD. Anyway both HD are in FAT32. I read here they should be in Mac ext Jour. I realise i should reformat them and do this by temporarily copy the data onto new HD. Can i use Time capsule for this by manually copy the data into new folder on TC? once the reformat is done i can copy them back from my TC.
- once the new HD are in Mac ext Journ, can the data still be accessed when plugging the HD into PC using Windows e.g at work i have regular Dell, does this mean i can no longer use the HD there?
- i have tried to do back up of my laptop with the Fujitsu HD attached and by deleting it from the exclude list in time machine options. it performs a back up but it last only for like 5 sec. this is impossible since the HD contains 170 GB of data which should take at least 10hrs to back up for the first time. also when i check in finder for back ups i see a folder with back up for that time point but it doenst include any data from that ext HD. i tried doing it again by excluding my internal HD of my mac and then the back up folder is actually empty which means it won t back up the ext HD even when i deleted it from the exclude list in time machine options.
as copy and reformating will take time, is it certain this will work becaue one of the posts above mentioned that even after reformating it to Mac ext journ didn t solve the problem.
thx for ur help and advice
@Vince – Yes, as long as you have the space available you can temporarily copy your files from the external hard drives to the Time Capsule in order to reformat your drives. You can do this wirelessly, but I would suggest connecting to your Time Capsule via an ethernet cable. the files should copy much faster.
Unfortunately, formatting the drives as Mac ext Journ will make them inaccessible to your PC. You’ll have to decide which is more important… having your dives backed up with Time Machine, or sharing the drives with PCs.
Reformatting your drives should work, but there’s always a chance there’s something else going on too. I would do one at a time to see how things go. After reformatting one of the externals, just copy a few files back to it and see if TM can back them up.
I’ve been reading this thread with interest, it’s been going a long time! I have a curveball that I’ve posted on the Time Machine forums:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2152393&stqc=true
let me know if anyone has any ideas.
thanks
which format should it be on the external drive; disk utility is showing a few:
mac os extended (journal) which is the current format
mac os extended
mac os extended (case sensitive, journal)
mac os extended (case sensitive)
thanks
(I have 2 wd mybooks; a 1tb used as the time machine, and a 250gb used for music/media; which is what i need to be backed up to the 1tb)
@ craig – I would stick with the current format, mac os extended (journal) .
“i was very interested in your posts. it s true that apple discussions deoen st mention this problem very extnsively.”
- I’ve noticed Apple is very quick to delete posts from users having problems with their products. I’ve posted about problems I’ve had in the past and they’ve been removed within a matter of days – with or without a resolution. I’m sure they want to present a problem-free image for their products, but it sure makes it more difficult for resourceful users looking for simple answers to simple questions. Thank goodness for this post here as it just helped me a bunch. Thanks again Apple… for yet again, nothing.
Can I use TM to backup an external drive to another external drive? I have a WD that I want to backup to a LaCie drive – each is 1.8TB.
Lovely long thread. I don’t believe my exact issue has yet been addressed. I’m hoping someone might have some clues for me.
I want to include a usb WD disk in the time machine backup. It’s formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
It is plugged in constantly.
It does not show up on the list of excluded files, under time machine options.
I was able to select the disk to add it to the excluded list. And then remove it. Then triggered a backup to see if that might have kick started something. But no joy.
Any ideas about what I need to do to get time machine to recognize the drive?
There’s been some mention that some brands are simply unrecognized. Might WD be one of those brands?
Thank you so much for your help.
Oh! I’m so wrong.
It has been backing up the external drive all along and I didn’t realize it.
I guess I was waiting for the piano to drop on my head.
geesh.