HT201250 My time machine only sometimes recognises my external hard drive, and when it does, it freezes and does not transfer any data. What is going on?

I changed hard-drive. Time machine started hopefully and mid-way through the whole thing froze. Since then, back to the same problem

I bought a new one yesterday to check - it went to 15GB, then suddenly all collapsed again. Would that be sheer coincidence that two hard-drives blow up when trying to use time machine?

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Time Machine doesn't recognise Seagate external hard drive

Forgive my ignorance, but I can't figure out how to connect Time Machine with my new hard drive. I've clicked on "select back up disk" but my external hard drive doesn't appear. I've looked at a lot of similar support online, but everything tells me to click the button and select the drive, but not what to do if there is no drive to select. Can anyone help me? Am I missing something obvious?

mel_hann wrote:
I found this:
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/217131en
This tells me it can be done and that it's quite simple. It's all fine until step 4. When I click on Time Machine Backup Configuration it just connects to the Apple support page for how to set up Time Machine. Nowhere to input my details. Grrrrr.... This shouldn't be this hard!
In theory, I agree that it ought to be simple, but that's Seagate's programming, not Apple's. Few folks here, and none at Apple, are familiar with it.
Do you have the current version? Does it claim to be compatible with the version of OSX you're on (is that Snow Leopard 10.6.8, per your profile)? Not all NASs are compatible with all versions of OSX. You need to contact Seagate (or return the NAS).
Again, I'd strongly recommend reconsidering. I just spent the better part of a couple of days helping a user of a GoFlex Home who replaced her internal HD, then found her backups were corrupted, piece her system back together. Not for the faint of heart.
Take a look for yourself: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5061341
There's a lot of chaff there -- she's not an experienced Mac user (she is now!), but was very determined to get her stuff back.

HT201250 Can Time Machine backup files stored on external hard drive

Can Time Machine back up files that are stored on external hard drive and save them on a different external hard drive?
I have my pictures stored on an external hard drive connected to my iMac. I want to make an exact copy of the pictures folder on a separate external hard drive. Can Time Machine do that?
If yes, how?
If no, what's a good way to create a mirror of the folder on External Hard Drive #1 (the original) on External Hard Drive #2 (the backup)?
I am not opposed to manually copying every couple weeks or month, but (1) it's less convenient and (2) I got an error message the first time I tried this saying the files couldn't be copied because some of the files being copied had the same name as each other (not exactly that, I'm at work and don't have the message in front of me right now, but that was the gist of it).
Thanks!

1. Yes, if both drives are formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
2. Reformat the drives if needed, open the Time Machine pane of System Preferences, and remove the drive with the pictures from the list of items set to be excluded.
(110331)

HT201250 I have thousands of pictures on my Mac. If something happens to my Mac I don't want them lost. I do time machine back ups to an external hard drive once a week. Is this good enough for making sure my pictures don't ever get lost?

I have thousands of photos on my Mac. If something happens to my Mac obviously, I don't want to lose the photos. I do Time Machine back ups to an external hard drive once a week. Is this good enough to make sure my pictures don't get lost?

tgs6164 wrote:
I have thousands of photos on my Mac. If something happens to my Mac obviously, I don't want to lose the photos. I do Time Machine back ups to an external hard drive once a week. Is this good enough to make sure my pictures don't get lost?
Purchase a couple of these when they go on sale.
Start burning all the photos onto DVDs.
At least you'll have all your photos if your computer, time machine or any other backup you use goes bonkers.

HT201250 Time machine back up using a external hard drive connected to the Airport extreme

How can I setup a time machine back up using a external hard drive connected to the Airport extreme? Even better for time managment purposes I want to use the Eithernet Thunderbolt connection for the first back up and then through the wifi there after for daily routine Time Machine back ups.

You can attach a hard drive, but Time Machine backups to a drive at the USB port at the AirPort Extreme are not supported by Apple, so it's not possible to say what your actual results might be.
If you decide to try this, it would be wise to have a secondary backup plan in place as well.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/15139.html

How can I get Time Machine to back up an external hard drive (iPhotos) that is attached to airport extreme base station. Note: Time machine is usb to macbook pro and external drive with iphotos is usb to airport extreme base station. Help please. Thanks!

How can I get Time Machine to back up an external hard drive (iPhotos) that is attached to airport extreme base station. Note: Time machine is usb to macbook pro and external drive with iphotos is usb to airport extreme base station. Help please. Thanks!

Once you have the drive connected to your Mac, click System Preferences (gear icon) on the dock
Click Time Machine
Click Options
Be default, the hard drive will be Excluded from backups. Click the drive to highlight it, then click the "-" (minus) button at the bottom of the list to remove the drive from Excluded items.
The drive will be backed up on the next Time Machine pass
Everything above assumes that the hard drive has been formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as Time Machine will only backup drives in that format.

How do I use time machine to backup to an external hard drive plugged into my airport extreme

How do I use time machine to backup to an external hard drive plugged into my airport extreme? I used to be able to but now time machine will not recognize my hard drive to select as a backup when plugged into my airport extreme. I'm not sure what happened or changed. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks

First thing to do is go to the Pondini tips page, then follow the link to his full TM site for all the details.

If i have Time Machine backed up on an external hard drive, do i just plug the drive into another macbook pro and all my stuff is in the new computer? also, does it matter if the new computer is running Lion when the backed up info came from Snow Leopard

If i have Time Machine backed up on an external hard drive, do i just plug the drive into another macbook pro and all my stuff is in the new computer? Also, does it matter if the new computer is running Lion when the backed up info came from Snow Leopard 10.6.8?

No and Yes
Don't use TM for this purpose, clone your drive to an external, plug the external into another MBP and reboot from it. Please note that booting a machine that came with Lion may not be possible from a drive with Snow Leopard.

Time Machine says both of my external hard drives require reformatting to case insensitive. What do I do?

I have been successfuly using Time Machine to back my iMac to an external hard drive (via usb) and everything has been fine for the last year. I have been using TM to back up to a HD called Terra LaCie via usb.
A week ago, my iMac hard drive was full--so I spulrged and bought a 6 TB external hard drive (Western Digital My Book-Thunderbolt). I set up the new Thunderbold HD to use RAID 1 (mirror) and copied most of my iMac hard drive over to the Thunderbolt HD.
I kept my working photographs (most recent) on my iMac and felt good to know my older photographs are on my new Thunderbolt hard drive.
For a few days, Time Machine seemed to work fine (backing up my iMac to Terra LaCie HD. I haven't been concerned with backing up the Thunderbolt drive (as I feel that mirroring is same as backing up).
Yesterday, Time Machine indicated the lastest back-up failed (for the HD called Terra LaCie). Now, when I go into Time Machine, the dialog box indicates the following message:
"Are you sure you want to erase the backup disk “Terra Lacie”? Erasing will destroy all information on the disk and can’t be undone.
The disk must be erased before it can be used for Time Machine backups because a disk you are backing up is case sensitive, but the backup disk is not."
When I open Time Machine to look at my external hard drives (I also have a third usb portable drive); two of the three drives indicate the following:
"reformat required; case insensitive disk".
The small, portable hard drive (that I'm also using) doesn't say it needs to be reformated (but my new Thunderbolt and my old usb HD both indicate the same message (above).
What should I do? I just spent days transferring my photographs from my iMac to my new Thunderbolt. Should I just not use Time Machine any longer and work from my Thunderbolt drive?
Am I to understand that my iMac suddenly become case sensitive? Sorry if this was too much information about my hard-ware set-up.
Any help someone can provide me would be greatly appreciated. I suppose I need to understand Time Machine and perhaps my Thunderbolt better.

Hi BDAqua,
Bravo, you helped me solve my problem.
The Case Sensitive Disk was the small portable hard drive that I was using termporarily.
I just disconnected it and I started TM machine and everything seems to be working just fine.
Thank you very much!!!!

Can Time Machine back up a second external hard drive that is attached via usb to a Time Capsule?

Can Time Machine back up a second external hard drive that is attached via usb to a Time Capsule?
I have a iMac with 10.7.4

I want to back up the data on the external Hard Drive that is attached to the Time Capsule to the Tim Capsule using Time Machine.
Thanks for the clarification. Unfortunately, that will not work. You will need to connect the drive directly to your Mac if you want Time Machine to backup the drive to the Time Capsule.

I am having trouble installing. downloaded Mavericks but it will not let me install to hard drive, says that is reserved for Time Machine. I have an external hard drive, but disconnected that before download.

I downloaded Mavericks but can't get past the install; it thinks my hard drive is reserved for Time Machine. I have an external hard drive but dis-connected that before download.
I have Time Machine turned off.

Check to see if you have a file name Backups.backupdb on the disk drive.
If the installer sees such a file it assumes that the disk drive is being used by Time Machine.
Allan

How Can I Migrate My Time Machine Backups To A New External Hard Drive?

I have a external hard drive that has 500 GBs left, but I want to buy a larger drive.

ivan wrote:
How Can I Migrate My Time Machine Backups To A New External Hard Drive?
I have a external hard drive that has 500 GBs left, but I want to buy a larger drive.
Hi iVain
Fire up *Disk Utility*, click the Restore tab, then drag your old and new TM drives into the Source and Destination fields. Click Restore, and a complete copy of your old TM files will be made on the new drive. Go to TM preferences and select the new drive, and it will continue backing up just as it left off.
Hope this answers your question. See:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2595485&tstart=0

How do I set up Time Machine to backup to an external hard drive on my wireless router?

I have just set up an external hard drive to my wireless router and am now wanting to set up Time Machine to back up to the hard drive. I can see the hard drive in Finder and can even send files to it manually. I just don't see in setting up Time Machine any option to backup to that hard drive. Is it even possible?

Well, I figured out a way around it that works for me but may not be suitable for everyone. Instead of connecting the external hard drive to the router I tried connecting it directly to my computer. I then right-clicked the hard drive's folder on my desktop, clicked "Get Info" and checked the box that says "Shared Folder". I then went to the bottom of that window and under "Sharing & Permissions" and next to "Everyone" checked that they could all "Read and Write".
The hard drive is now shared over my network, so when I got on one of my other Mac's that I was wanting to set up Time Machine with, the Time Machine Application had no problem finding the hard drive and backing up to it.
I have all computer's setup for file sharing too, so that may need to be checked as well.
This was a simple enough fix but the reason I said that it may not be suitable for everyone is that the other computer's backing up to this hard drive via Time Machine is now reliant on my computer being turned on. I'm okay with that though.

Having trouble getting Time Machine to back up my external hard drive. Any suggestions?

I'm running Mountain Lion on my iMac and I've been using Time Machine to back it up to my Time Capsule. Recently, the iMac's hard drive filled up, so I moved my iTunes library to a new Airport Time Capsule. But I can't seem to get Time Machine to include the new Airport Time Capsule in its back up.
The only suggestion I can find is to make sure it's not excluded in the Time Machine options, and I can see that nothing is excluded. However, when I go into Time Machine, the Airport Time Capsule is greyed out in the Finder window.
Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance, I'm a little nervous about having my iTunes library hanging out there without a back up...

Linc Davis wrote:
You can't back up the internal drive of the Time Capsule with Time Machine. It will only back up locally attached storage devices, not network devices. There's no way around it. You may be able to back up the TC with third-party software such as "Carbon Copy Cloner," but it will be very slow. The internal drive of the TC is only suitable for use as a backup device. It's not suited for storing original data.
yeah well you can use the external hard drive as a data extension to the time capsule internal hard drive. like a RAID in effect...

Using Time Machine to back up an external hard drive dedicated to Adobe Lightroom 5

I recently began to use Adobe Lightroom 5 (I continue to use Aperture, as I have for years). All of the Lightroom image files and catalogs are on one external hard drive, which I use on my iMac, my Macbook Pro, and in the digital labs of a school where I'm taking a course.
Not yet having developed a protocoI for creating a back up of all my Lightroom image files and catalogs that I could use in the event of my Lightroom-dedicated drive's failure, I have just done a drag and drop of the whole drive's contents to another external drive (which, as it happens, I have been using for some time for my Aperture vaults).
I am thinking of removing the dedicated Lightroom drive from the excluded list of my iMac's Time Machine (which uses yet another external drive), so that I can easily and automatically create back ups of changes to the Lightroom external drive without having to do the cumberome and inelegant drag and drop at some yet-to-be-determined frequency. (The Macbook Pro uses a Time Capsule for its Time Machine; I envision using only the iMac's TM external drive for Lightroom backups.)
What is the simplest and most desirable way to actually execute the backup? I envision that it would be this: that every time I want to do a Lightroom back up, I'd mount the Lightroom external drive on the iMac (or keep it mounted if my work session has just been on the iMac) and then ask Time Machine to "Back Up Now." When the backup is finished, I'd dismount the dedicated Lightroom drive.
A related question is what if anything would be the effect on my Lightroom work if a Time Machine back up began while I was working in Lightroom? Or if for some reason an hourly TM back up began and I needed to quickly end a Lightroom session before the backup was completed?

Mac Basics: Time Machine backs up your Mac

HT201250 My time machine only sometimes recognises my external hard drive, and when it does, it freezes and does not transfer any data. What is going on?

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