Can I back up my external hard drives to time machine?

Hi,
I've backed up my laptop and two external hard drives to my time machine - but because the data on the hard drives were backed up through my computer over a month ago I can't now seem to access the back ups of the hard drives.
Is there a way of accessing the back up of the hard drives from the specific day I did this, or is there a more efficient way of backing them up so I can permanently access the back up files for these drives?
On other answers to similar questions:
'Any drives not specifically on the Exclude list will be backed up' - my external drives are not permanently plugged into my computer so the back up seems to be overridden on the next back up.
'Just be sure your backup drive is large enough - at least twice the capacity of the total capacity of the drives being backed up.' - time capsule is 2TB, I have external drives with 1.5TB of info at the moment, will this be sufficient?
Thanks,
P

I plugged the hard drives into my laptop and the time machine backed them up as if they were part of my computer on the routine hourly back up.
But because I only had the back up drive plugged in for the duration of the actual back up, the external drives only show up in the time machine on that particular day, and subsequent hourly / daily backups on time machine didn't show the external hard drives again.
I only seem to be able to access a month's worth of backing up so because the back up of the external drives was done over a month ago I can't seem to retrieve the back up of the external drive I did on that particular day.
Does that make sense? Is there a better way of doing this?

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