Backup Time Machine folders into another External Drive

I wanted to know if its possible to backup five different Mac computers Time Machine folders into one major external harddrive. Right now, each mac computer has a external harddrive for backup using Time Machine. I wanted to Backup each of these external hard drives with Time Machine folder into one major external harddrive.How can I bypass that.

It's possible-just select the desired disk on all the macs.
Unfortunately, you won't be able to continue using the same backups you have now; you'll have to start from scratch on all the computers.
Good luck!
Message was edited by: joshz

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Time Machine issues since adding external drive

System spec:
2012 Mac Mini, quad core 2.3ghz i7, 16gb RAM, OS X Yosemite 10.10.2
Problem:
Today I added an external USB 3.0 1TB hard drive to my Mac Mini - a self powered Seagate one. I want Time Machine (running on another external drive - a mains powered 2TB USB 2.0 Western Digital drive) to back this drive up - so I went into the Time Machine preferences pane and removed the drive from the exclusions list to which it had automatically been added (since TM doesn't usually back up external drives)
I moved some data to the drive and Time Machine began to back this up as expected on it's next run. I went to check the TM drive in Finder to make sure it was backing up correctly when I noticed that the folder for this latest backup wasn't appearing - and that the Latest link went to the backup BEFORE the drive was installed. Both Finder and the Time Machine pref pane correctly showed the TM drive space dropping though - and if I went to Terminal and listed the contents of the Time Machine drive, the folder for the current backup appeared and Latest pointed to it as expected.
I let this backup and a second backup finish - so at this point I have two backups that have run since adding the external drive. The backups appear in the navigator on the right hand side - but they are greyed out compared to the others. If you try to click on one of these greyed out backups, TM scrolls back to an empty Finder window titled "Waiting: ...." and the time the backup ran.
I tried rebooting to fix this - when I checked again after rebooting, Time Machine showed the two backups and both were accessible and navigable within the TM restore interface. This was four hours ago. Three more backups have run since my reboot and they are exhibiting the same symptoms as the ones prior - not showing in Finder, not linked from Latest, and greyed out in the TM restore interface.
While I'm fairly confident the data IS being backed up, this is still going to be a problem if I need to restore. Has anyone seen this before and how did you fix it if so?

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then take the action that isn't working the way you expect. Select any messages that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
Some private information, such as your name or email address, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

I'm using Time Machine and a LaCie external drive to backup. I also have a 8 GB LaCie flash drive I want to use for small jobs. If I plug the LaCie flash drive in, is my Mac going to think it is the LaCie external drive and start trying to backup?

I'm using Time Machine and a LaCie external drive to backup. I also have a 8 GB LaCie flash drive I want to use for small jobs. If I plug the LaCie flash drive in, is my Mac going to think it is the LaCie external drive and start trying to backup?

no.

Time Machine has locked my external drive. HELP

Time Machine hosed me again. After several unsuccessful attempts to backup on my PowerMac G5 dual 2.33 Ghz, I was able to complete my first full backup to an external 2 gig DROBO (USB 2.0 interface). It took 20 hours to do 180 gigs.
Now I have just discovered that Time Machine has made that external drive READ-ONLY! I cannot write to the drive and neither can Time Machine.
Does anybody know what is up and how to fix this short of using root UNIX shell which terrifies me. I just want to take it off and cut my losses, but the drive also has a ton of music on it that iTunes uses.

Okay Jeffery, I think I've found the solution, especially if you are seeing the "Unknown" user in your Get Info window's Sharing & Permissions setting for your drobo.
I had written earlier about my work-around for getting my drobo to work right after getting the "read-only" error from Time Machine. But unfortunately it was a temporary and temperamental fix. There were times then I had to eject the disk and launch Disk Utility to run a repair on the disk which would take more than half an hour on my drobo. But all the while my permissions had this "Unknown" user. Well I decided to "Go UNIX" and see if I could fix this problem once and for all.
I opened up Terminal and typed "*ls -la /Volumes*". This gives me a directory listing of my mounted drive volumes. I noticed that all of my drives, internal, external, USB and FireWire, all had "root" as the user and "admin" as the group, _EXCEPT for my drobo!_ So I forced it to conform by changing it manually by typing "*sudo chown root:admin /Volumes/Drobo\ Backup\ HD/*".
sudo = temporarily enables root mode by asking for your password before executing.
chown = changes ownership to...
root:admin = "root" is the user and "admin" is the group.
*/Volumes/Drobo\ Backup\ HD/* = My drobo drive is named "*Drobo Backup HD*", but UNIX sees spaces as command separators, so you have to use the "\ " to signify spaces within a name.
After doing this over a week ago, _I have not had any other problems_ with using my drobo as a backup drive. It has never come up with the "read-only" error in Time Machine, the Sharing & Permissions setting do not have any "Unknown" users or groups, I don't even need to wait for my drobo before logging in like I did in the past. I just boot my Mac and everything with my drobo and Time Machine just works... No problems!
It seems to be permanently fixed for me, so if you are willing to try this solution, I'm sure it would work for you. If UNIX terrifies you too much, and you do not trust yourself editing the commands above, let me know the name of your drobo drive on your desktop and I will post a message with the EXACT UNIX commands customized for just for you, so all you have to do is copy and paste them into your Terminal window to do it. But like I said, I've done this over a week ago and I not had one single problem.

I need to create a second back-up of iPhoto from Time Machine to a separate external drive. The old iPhoto in TM will not open. Please help!

I need to create a second back-up of iPhoto from Time Machine to a separate external drive. The old iPhoto in TM will not open. Please help! And thank you!

Most Simple Back Up:
Drag the iPhoto Library from your Pictures Folder to another Disk. This will make a copy on that disk.
Slightly more complex: Use an app that will do incremental back ups. This is a very good way to work. The first time you run the back up the app will make a complete copy of the Library. Thereafter it will update the back up with the changes you have made. That makes subsequent back ups much faster. Many of these apps also have scheduling capabilities: So set it up and it will do the back up automatically.
Example of such apps: Chronosync - but there are many others. Search on MacUpdate or the App Store

Time Machine can't find external drive after installing Lion

Time Machine can't find external drive after installing Lion. I have a Laice 1 terabyte external drive that worked fine with Snow Leopard and now no show ... tried connecting it to front port and Mac Pro can't see it. Also lost Office,Quicken, and Final Cut Pro says: " You can't open application because Power PC apps are no longer supported" this is Not a good surprise!

Does the drive work when just directly connected? If so, have you prepped the drive?
Extended Hard Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. If you need to reformat your startup volume, then you must boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger or Leopard.)
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Set the number of partitions from the dropdown menu (use 1 partition unless you wish to make more.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (only required for Intel Macs) then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the volume(s) mount on the Desktop.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.

Time machine back up other external drive?

Hi folks,
My HD is filling up fast. What I need to know is if I move say, my music and photos to an external drive, will time machine back up the music and photos when they reside on the external drive? I have time machine running on an external drive dedicated to time machine. I'm using OX Mavericks.
Thanks,
Steve

Mine is set up similar. I use TIME MACHINE as a back up and then my redundant back up is to a 2 terabyte USB External, so now I have everything backed up twice.

Backup multiple computers using Time machine to a single external drive

Is it possible to backup multiple computers to a single external drive connected to an Xserve using Time machine? We have a Six TB external drive that we are connecting to an Xserve that has three drives. We want to backup the entire

Set the drive as a network share in the File Sharing section of System Preferences on the Xserve it is connected to and see if Time Capsule on the other machines can see it. If so, it should work. If you don't want the whole drive as a network share create a folder for backups on it and set that folder as a network share.

Time Machine + Aperture = 1 Fried External Drive

Hi, I'm really hoping someone can help me. Last week, I set up my first TM update on a partitioned LaCie Mini 250GB. One partition was called "Laptop Backup." I had planned to use SuperDuper for it, but decided to use Time Machine instead. The other partition contained videos and images.
I set up the partition called "Laptop Backup" as the Time Machine drive. Time Machine successfully renamed the partition and changed its icon.
I started running Time Machine. It was working fine. So I thought I would also put my Aperture library on the other partition on the same hard drive (it was previously on my internal drive).
I imported all of my photos (thousands of them) from my internal drive and another external drive into the Aperture library. That seemed to work too. So I deleted the copies of the photos elsewhere and quit Aperture.
When I quit, Aperture said it was still compiling thumbnails and asked if I wanted to let it do its thing. I clicked "OK." Time Machine was still working merrily along at this point, but both Aperture and Time Machine looked they were going to take time to finish the processes they'd started. It was late, so I let them run while I slept.
In the morning, I woke up to find that Time Machine had gotten hung-up at around 10GB (of roughly 66 GB). I tried canceling the update, and then turning off Time Machine, but nothing happened. Aperture was also hanging. I tried force-quitting the applications, but no luck. So I shut off the drive.
Since then, the drive has been really sick. It mounts (though sometimes the partition with Aperture on it doesn't mount completely), but Finder, Disk Utility, and even Activity Monitor, causes it to freeze up completely. The partition set up for Time Machine has no reverted back to its original name, "Laptop Backup." From the sounds the drive makes, it seems like it is performing one task again and again. This will continue for about 15 minutes and then it just spins.
I have repaired the permissions on my internal HD several times. But attempts to repair or verify the external HD cause the system to crash. Likewise, I tried erasing the contents of the partition with the incomplete Time Machine backup, but Disk Utility cannot unmount the disk, and gets hung up.
I tried opening the Aperture library on the other partition, through Finder, but that caused Finder to crash. It was unable even to relaunch until I turned off the external drive.
I tried deleting the Aperture preferences file (~/library/preferences/com.apple.Aperture.plist, or whatever it is), but there isn't one.
I can't give up on the drive because all my photographs are there, and I need them for work. I'm really hoping there is something I can do to get at the drive, but I'm not familiar with command-line prompts and such.
Can anyone help me solve this problem? Many thanks,
ez

Ah, thanks. Sorry, I misunderstood.
Well, that didn't do it either, so I guess the answer to my question is that I'm pretty well f-d. I will try data recovery software. If that doesn't work, I'll find out how much a commercial data recovery service will cost and figure out if 190 GB of irreplaceable data is worth it.
Thank you both again for your helpful suggestions. I really appreciate your taking the time to help. I'll leave the thread open in case someone reading has a brainstorm, but in the meantime, thank you!
Apple, if you're reading, this is not OK. I lost huge chunks of my record collection with an iTunes update a few years back. Now I've lost all my photographs and dozens of Final Cut Pro projects, the product of years of travel and work, and I need to tell my boss that the dog ate my homework.
Too late for me, but could you please take a look at Time Machine and/or Aperture to try to make sure this doesn't happen to someone else? Seems like great, useful software, and for many people, I'm sure it is, but in this case it behaved like malware. In retrospect, my own actions were pretty stupid (loading processes like that, not keeping copies of the data elsewhere), but with a few painful exceptions, my Mac has withstood whatever I've thrown at it, and I got used to that. A temporary fix could be to limit the number of items you can add to an Aperture library at a time, or simply to prompt users to close Aperture before beginning Time Machine.
Nerowolfe, now that I've pretty much given up hope, maybe you could tell me whatever it was you didn't want to tell me I might have done? And you said that any use of the drive will probably overwrite existing data. I assume this doesn't include using data recovery software on the drive?
Thanks again, both,
ez

Time Machine is Corrupting my External Drives, Sparsebundle on NAS

Started as my timemachine drive getting flagged as locked and read only 6 months ago. Read up on this problem and no great solution so I buy a new drive so I can fix later without deleting my backups. I tried repairing but it can't be repaired by disk utility. Tried logging in as root and clearing all the permissions, flags and acl's etc, always tells me some type of error why it can't do that. Can open the drive and view the files in time machine. Can open and view files in finder/terminal. Can't copy them off the drive in the directory structure that is there, always says there is some reason it can't do it.
New drive was a NAS approved for time machine use, worked great for a month. First verification thing ran today, and of course Time Machine found a problem and the only solution is for it to delete the whole sparse bundle and start over. Great, because 3 days ago my MBP started locking up, hard reboots, had to repair from CD boot multiple times, still getting beach ball of death and random lockups even though activity monitor says everything is good. Strongly suspect harddrive is going south despite testing out ok.
So right now I bought yet another external drive and am running a new time machine backup as I can't access the last 4 years of time machine backups I have. If I get this running again I'm returning to my previous 10 years of superduper imaging that were rock solid.
Any tips on getting data out of time machine more efficiently once it has locked the drive down so badly? Any reason why in root I still can't overcome the flags on the drive?
Haven't tried much with the sparsebundle yet as I'm worried the drive will fail any moment.

New drive was a NAS approved for time machine use
Not by Apple.
Backing up to a third-party NAS with Time Machine is risky, and unacceptably risky if it's your only backup. I know this isn't the answer you want, and I also know that the manufacturer says the device will work with Time Machine, and that it usually seems to work. Except when you try to restore, and find that you can't.
If you want network backup with Time Machine, use as the destination either an Apple Time Capsule or an external hard drive connected to another Mac or to an 802.11ac AirPort base station. Only the 802.11ac base stations support Time Machine, not any older model.
If you're determined to keep using the NAS for backup, your only recourse for any problems that result is to the manufacturer (which will blame Apple.)

How do I move time machine files from one external drive to another?

My original external drive isn't big enough. So I've bought a second larger one. How do I move the earlier Time Machine backups from Ext Drive #1 to Ext Drive #2 so I can access my full history, and leave Drive #1 for other backup items?
Ext Drive #1= SimpleTech 120 GB
Ext Drive #2= WEstern 500 GB

When you are ready to pass the 320GB drive on, I would format it. That will make the entire drive available to him to use as his TM. I would be sure that each drive has a unique name so that there will be no confusion for TM as to which computer goes with which drive. If you want to start fresh with the 500GB drive, I'd format it as mac-extended-journaled. When you connect it the first time to your computer, you will be asked if you want to use it as your TM. If you are not prompted to select it as your TM, you can configure TM by opening system preferences, click on TM, click on "change drive" and choose your new drive.
Another choice is to follow the steps in my previous response for restoring your current TM to the new drive by booting from a Leopard start up disk and accessing Disk Utilities from there so you can restore the drive. It is essential that the new hard drive is the exact name as the old TM hard drive. In this last scenario you would continue adding to your current set of backups.

Setting up Time Machine to use an external drive attached to another mac

I have an external drive connected to an iMac G5 (OS X 10.5.6) that is used by Time Machine on that mac. I would like to set up Time Machine on my MacBook Pro (also OS X 10.5.6) to back up to that same drive. File sharing is enabled on the iMac but I can't seen to mount just the iMac's the external drive. Rather, the MacBook Pro mounts the entire iMac file system --- it shows up as "brian.imac" under the 'shared' heading of the finder window; the iMac's individual volumes show up as folders. Time Machine doesn't seem to recognize these as allowable destinations. What am I doing wrong?

Brian Curtiss wrote:
When I click on "brian.imac" on the MacBook Pro it opens the iMac's file system in the finder window. The iMac's external drive appears as a folder in this window. Clicking on that folder opens the external drive in the finder (the icon along the top of the finder window even looks like a drive, not a folder), but the 'drive' doesn't appear on the desktop or along the left side of the finder window.
that's normal.
The iMac external drive is listed as an attached drive if I click on the "brian.macbook" under the "Devices" heading of the finder window (along with the built-in drive, mobile me drive and 'network,).
This should be enough. normally, at this point the drive should appear as a possible TM drive choice. I don't know why it doesn't work for you.
You can try the following terminal command. It should not be needed but maybe it will help
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
With the iMac's external drive's finder window (on the MacBook Pro) still open, clicking "Choose Backup Disk..." in the "Time Machine" system preferences window brings up an empty list. How do I get Time Machine to recognize the iMac's external drive as a valid choice?

Converting Time Machine back into an External Hard Drive?

before i got my macbook, i used my 320GB external hard drive on a windows XP-run computer. i transferred all my files to my new mac, before using it as my time machine drive.
it's now incompatible with windows though.
is there any way to either
-allow my drive to be used with a windows XP computer?
or
-unassociate the drive with time machine, and revert it back to a plain old external hard drive?

In order to use that old drive with Windows XP, I'd repartition it with the MBR option and format it as a Fat32 drive. Once you connect it to the WinXP machine you can also reformat the drive to NTFS for better performance and compatibility with XP.

How do I move my Time Machine data to another hard drive?

I have a WD Passport 250 external that I want to move my current TM data out of, and put in my new WD My Book 1TB. I tried moving over the Backups.backupdb file directly to a new whatever partition on my 1TB drive (I have two partitions, one for TM and one for whatever). Every time I do a copy and paste, it doesn't do anything. I can't even rename the Backups.backupdb folder. Is it locked? I want to move it over to my 1TB drive so I can format this Passport and use it for something else.

Fine - if you wish to use Apple's DU feel free to do so. However, you might ask yourself why Apple does not expose the DU's feature in its Time Machine Help docs for restoring a TM volume to another volume.
SuperDuper! version 2.5 was a long time coming because dealing with the Time Machine 'innards' was a non trivial task. It now works perfectly.
Do not assume that DU and the TM innards will always be in sync.
SD! is dedicated to ensure its customer base has a robust, reliable and up-to-date facility for cloning a TM volume which by the way can be on the same Volume as a cloned boot disk/volume.

Recognizing Time machine files after moving external drive to time capsule

I have a LaCie external hard drive that contains my time machine backups, and would like to attach it to my time capsule (in the basement) to free up desk and usb space. When I attach it to the capsule the drive is recognized, but it does not recognize the backup files. As it stands if I select the drive from time machine it will start to back up all over again using only the remaining space on the drive.
My options are to reformat the drive and start over, losing my previous backups, or I can find a way for time machine to recognize the existing files on that drive. Does anybody know a way to do this?
Any advice would be appreciated:)

Network backups are in a different format than local backups. The network backups are contained in a disk image. Although it's theoretically possible to copy the existing backup folder to that image, I wouldn't give much for your chances of success.
A much better plan would be to keep the drive as it is, continuing to use it for local backups at least intermittently, and start a new backup on another drive. You need more than one backup to be safe anyway.

Backup Time Machine folders into another External Drive

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