OS X :: Time Machine - Back Up From External?
Oct 29, 2009
I was told today by an Apple retail employee that Time Machine will not back up from anything other than an internal drive and I wanted to confirm whether this was the case. For example I have an iMac with a 750GB internal and I also have a 750GB external drive. I want to keep my iTunes Music and iPhoto libraries on the internal but keep all my movies on the external drive for space reasons. I want to then use a 2TB external drive to work with Time Machine. I was told that if I want to back up the 750 "Movies" drive that I will need to manually copy it because Time Machine will only back up the path of those files and that drive can't be included in the backup. To me this seems to go against what TM is about, since I then have to manually manage that part of the backup, adding new items, rather than getting the benefits of TM's incremental backup. Can anyone confirm or deny this. Second question is regarding TM for multiple machines. Can a 2TB drive be used as the TM drive for both an iMac and a MacBook or will the drive need to be partitioned?
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Mar 4, 2009
Say my macbook pro crashes and I lose everything. However, I have been saving everything to an external drive using the Time Machine app. Can I use my external drive to get my computer to exactly the same state it was in before it crashed? By this I mean.
1) Desktop icons in the same places
2) System preferences all the same
3) Sticky notes all still exist and are laid out on the desktop just like previously before my hard drive crashed and I lost everything
4) My dock layout is exactly the same, same apps, same locations in the dock
I have been wondering this for quite some time. Because I know you can restore the essentials (i.e. Word documents, many different saved files) but what about little things like the above mentioned items?
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Mar 25, 2012
I am finding conflicting information on this one. I have a 2TB drive plugged into my Time Capsule. This drive houses my music collection. Will Time Machine backup this drive?
Info:
MacBookPro, Mac OS X (10.6.7), Early 2011 13"
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Mar 6, 2009
I have a 500Gb internal drive in my iMac, another 500Gb external drive (USB) and a 1Tb Firewire800 drive. Can I set up Time Machine to back up both my internal 500Gb drive and my external 500Gb drive to my external 1Tb drive?
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Dec 25, 2009
Time Machine is backing up my internal 1Mac hard drive fine to an external drive ("backup ext drive"). I have another external hard drive attached to the Mac that I would also like to back up to the back-up ext drive. I've looked around on Time Machine as best I can but can't find any place that lists drives to be backed up, so I can tell Time Machine to back it up, also. I have found a list in Time Machine of drives I can back up to. That list shows both external drives. But of course, I want to back this one up, not use it as a back up drive. Should be something simple I'm missing. I've seen a lot in the forum about issues backing up external ard drives via Airport Express (or Extreme), but though I have Airport Express, both external drives (back up ext drive and the one to be backed up) are directly connected to the iMac, so I'm not trying to use Airport for this.
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Mar 17, 2012
I plug in my hard drive and it is working..click "back up now" and it starts, but stops within a few seconds?
Info:
macbook pro, Mac OS X (10.6.5)
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Nov 4, 2010
I want to replace my current HDD with new SSD, here is the steps I will do, identify if this is feasible!!!
1. Put ssd in a external hard drive enclosure
2. Connect the external SSD drive to MBP
3. Back up the entire OS and files with time machine
4. Remove the enclosure, take out ssd
5. Put SSD in mu MBP, replacing HDD
Will this work?
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Feb 27, 2009
If I have two hard drives in my Mac Pro, can I back them up to one external drive with Time Machine?
If I have a third drive that I DO NOT want to back up with Time Machine, can I specify that I want to back up the first two but not the third?
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Aug 19, 2009
I had Time Machine making wireless backups from my MacBook to a LaCie hard drive plugged into an Airport Extreme Base Station. It's worked great for at least year. The 10.5.8 upgrade seems to have broken it. It's still not an Apple supported configuration.
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Nov 4, 2009
1) I have a full external hard drive and would like to transfer all my time machine back-ups to a new larger one. How do I do this?
2) And when I'm ready to transfer all time machine data to my new iMac using external hard drive can I choose all dates so I'm including all pictures videos etc?
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Aug 22, 2014
Mac Mini running 10.8.5. Time Machine will not back up brand new OWC MiniStack external HD. I've trashed TM prefs, reformatted the TM drive, verified that there are no exclusions, but it won't back up the external HD which contains only data files -- no system, no applications. TM does back up the internal HD.
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Jun 22, 2014
I probably have all kinds of misconceptions about Resetting to an earlier time for the computer I have. It's a 2009 macbook, running OS 10.8.5. I got it last week, previous to this machine I have been running a powerbook G4. It does not have a backup with Time Machine either.
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Sep 8, 2009
I'm an idiot, pleased to meet you.I had 2 external drives connected to my Macbook Pro, both had time machine back ups on...I meant to delete one of these but deleted the wrong one, and dragged it into Trash. On realising my mistake I tried to drag it back out of Trash, as you would normally but after "preparing to copy" for four hours it told me the drive was full...It's a 500gb drive, and the Time Machine back up is the only thing on it, so presumably it's just trying to copy itself when the back up is still present on the drive, albeit in the Trash.
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Aug 23, 2010
I was trying to set up my Time Machine to an external hard drive. I didn't continue because it asked to "initialize" the hard drive which I had a lot of important things on.
I have another external hard drive I'd like to use but, my Time Machine has this error code of -43. What is this and how can I use my Time Machine on another external hard drive?
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Jan 30, 2009
Is it possible to back-up the contents of a NAS drive to a FireWire or USB2 drive using a Mac and Time Machine?
I know there are methods to get TM to back-up TO a NAS but if, for example, someone had their iTunes library on a NAS for access over a network- could TM be used to copy that drive for safe-keeping?
The path of the back-up would, basically, go like this:
NAS --> ROUTER --> IMAC & TIME MACHINE --> USB2/FW DRIVE
Sorry if this seems a simple one but searching for an answer just yields dozens of results for backing-up TO a NAS drive, not copying/saving the NAS itself.
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Feb 15, 2010
Recently, I've figured out that when backing up, time machine only backs up some files, but not the entire thing... I see that this is a way to keep the size of the back up on a low level, true, but isn't it a bad way to back up your files?! Shouldn't it be full backups of the entire library?!
Second question; when I will set up my new mac machine I will buy this summer, is the integration really that easy and files do not get lost?! I am a bit skeptical as a few months ago I integrated data from my old computer to my mac (without using time machine, just regular back ups, manually) and some files were not being imported, god knows why.
Stupid question; when integrating the old files from time machine to a new mac, do they integrate system preferences / applications too? Cause I really have done lots of cool tweaking and it would suck to do all that stuff again...
Also, can I select the files I want to import or does it automatically import all the files from time machine to the new mac? A problem is that there is lots of (cookies, temp files etc.) stored on every mac and now, the quetsion is, does time machine import all these old/makingsystemslower/* little files too?!
What about the problem of leopard > snow leopard recovery?!
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Mar 14, 2010
If I do a time machine backup - does it back up everything on all accounts or just the one I'm currently logged in as?The reason I'm asking is, I just bought a (used) iMac with a 250GB drive, and I have ordered a 760GB WD green drive. Can I just back up using Time Machine and then restore via Time Machine? I have four accounts on here - I'd rather not have to go through the pains of reinstalling everything.
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Sep 15, 2010
I am new here and i have to say desperate. I need to do a system restore from time machine but the mac doesn't see the time machine back ups. I have tried to repair disk and all was ok.
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Dec 29, 2010
I have 2 seagate external hdds. one has manual backups and my photos, mp3s etc from my pc. the other one is brand new empty. this is my 1st mac.. so I was wondering what to use to back up time machine? or the memeo (comes with seagate) or any other backup software? I want to use the harddrives in both pcs and macs. mac reads my ntfs hdd but can't write it (I know there are some apps that can make the mac write on ntfs.) also I wanna back up my windows xp under parallels.
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Feb 11, 2009
In the audio world, bit per bit is important. When TM makes back-ups, are they bit per bit of the original?
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Mar 9, 2009
I'm trying to do a back up in Time Machine. It's been going for like an hour and it still says "Preparing Backup."
I haven't changed my files around much and it really should only have a couple of kb worth of new data to back up.
My last successful backup was yesterday. It's done this a few times since then. I tried to stop the back up and restart it to no avail.
I also went into my backups folder and deleted the "in progress" backup then tried to backup again and it's still not working.
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Jan 25, 2010
I own a uMBP late 09 running 10.6.2. Recently, i bought a Seagate FreeAgent Go 320Gb to use as back-up for both Mac and Windows. I partitioned it into equal HFS+ and FAT32, the former exclusively for Time Machine (which i will be using for the first time), and the latter for Windows.
Initial back-up via TM was successful, as i was able to store about 80Gb of data from my Macintosh partition into the ext drive. The problem is this : After several days of backing-up data, Time Machine displays the same set of files as the initial one. During this time, i have made various additions to my iTunes library as well as movie clips and other documents. These changes/additions did not reflect on the subsequent back-ups made by TM. The initial size of the back-up data stayed the same, pegged at 80Gb.
Am i doing something wrong here? The ext drive does not remain connected to my notebook always, and i only do force back-ups via the TM icon. Also, i have not encountered a single error/failed message when backing-up. On the options menu, i excluded only the Download folder. No other settings were altered.
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Mar 16, 2012
I have a MacBook Pro with a 500gb HDD (early 2011) and a Freedom 2tb external drive for Time Machine. Running latest Lion software
As you can it has space, but only the last few weeks of backup. I've had time machine running for about one year.
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Apr 23, 2012
I've been backing up my mac book pro using a WD passport drive and time machine but recently it stopped backing up and says "back up failed" when I try to back up. I can still access data on the drive but can't save to it anymore.
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8), WD passport drive
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May 27, 2012
I know this is a common issue and I've read all the other posts and tried everything, but time machine still won't back up. I need help figuring out if there's anything I can do, or if I need a bigger back up disk. If so, how big?
I have deleted old backups, excluded unnecessary files, and cleaned out folders. It says 157.46GB available of 159.7GB; but when it backs up it says it requires 188.30GB but only 157.46GB are available.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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Jun 21, 2012
why won't my time machine back up? plenty of space. just keeps showing it's loading
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Oct 31, 2007
I have all my media stored on an external hard drive hooked up to my airport. Can Time Machine back up this drive and my iMac?
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May 29, 2008
Time Machine (external USB/SATA) on my 2-month old iMac had been working perfectly. I installed 10.5.3. Everything still works perfectly EXCEPT I get an occasional error with Time Machine's hourly backup saying it could not do the backup. I can do the backup manually and the subsequent automatic backup goes OK. It's happened twice since my installation of 10.5.3 last night. I did Repair of the external drive and no problems were found.
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Mar 3, 2009
im getting my 17" MBP next week. i got a question about time machine app.
do i have to leave the back up HD constantly on?
is it possible that i turn the external back up HD on lets say once a week, run the time machine and do a back up of all changes?
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May 29, 2009
I have a new iMac that backs up regularly with Time Machine. I find that the Time Machine backups are for more data than my iMac hard drive changes. For example, yesterday it did three backups that I noticed. One was for about 300MB and the other for about 700MB and one for 2 MB. Right now it is doing a 1GB backup. The only changes I did to the iMac between yesterday and today were a few e-mail downloads (not more than 2MB) and a few pictures were imported (about 30MB).
Does anybody know why Time Machine is backing up so much data when nothing is changing on my Mac? My entire hard drive is about 62GB right now and it started at about 58GB. My Time Capsule hard drive that hosts the TM backups has used about 130GB of data. It had only used about 60GB of data after the initial backup about a month ago.
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