How can I keep Time Machine from Automatically backing up any external drive connected

Problem: Whenever I have an external drive attached and TimeMachine starts, it tries to back-up the drive. Usually, this causes Time Machine to gut my TimeMachine back-ups to try and make room before saying, not enough space to complete the back-up. NOT Helpful! I maintain offline/offsite clones of my drives but I also receive drives with large amounts of data which I will want backed up AFTER I have copied it to my drives. Yes, I can go into TimeMachine and exclude the drive(s). If I forget to do that, then BYE BYE back-ups.
Ideally, I would like a prompt asking if I want to include the drive in theTimeMachine back-up after I connect it. Anyone know how to set this?
or
I would be fine with simply having TimeMachine treat all drives unknown to the backup as drives to be ignored.
Thoughts?

perranegra wrote:
It worked beautifully before and would update only when I plugged the firewire drive in and also if I left it over 10 days it would remind me to back up the computer.
Right, the behavior hasn't changed between SL and Lion.
I would have liked the option to set times / days when I wanted.
SL didn't have this, any more than Lion does.
Also now I have a greyed out icon with a warning sign and clicking on the preferences it helpfully tells me the last back up has failed.
Because it DID.
I am usually happy with the updates and tweaks but this is one I am not happy and would appreciate a solution or at least a work around.... and no I don't like having the default to Time Machine as off!
Time Machine hasn't significantly changed between SL and Lion. Well, other than the local HD backup sets when a portable device is away from the actual backup destination, which really seem to freak people out for some reason.

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Explodey wrote:
There's always a way, with a little ingenuity. I just went to Get Info for that backup and changed the system privilege to "read only." And if that doesn't work, I'm sure something else will.
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As of right now we are all SOL unless you own a Time Capsule. At the very least I wish apple would offer some kind of trade-up if they are not going to release a software update.
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How do I set Time Machine to alternate between two attached external drives (so that if one fails I will have a separate backup to use)?

Hi Everyone.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Right off the bat let me say I am using Mavericks 10.9.1 on a 2011 Macbook Pro and using all Lacie external hard drives.
I am trying to get Time Machine to alternate between two attached external hard drives, trying to be safe in case one of the backup drives itself fails.
I have both drives set in Time Machine.
From what I gather Time Machine should by default alternate between drives when backing up (I would assume it does one big initial backup on each then subsequent backups are just changes).
But this is not how it seems to be working and I cannot find a straight answer despite much Googling and Foruming
Unfortunately it seems to only be backing up to "External Hard Drive 1".
There have been 4 backups since I set it up, all on "External Hard Drive 1", even though "External Hard Drive 2" is also attached and set in Time Machine.
I manually clicked "Back Up Now" and it started to work on "External Hard Drive 2" (like I want it to) for a minute but it appears to have stopped and gone back to backing up to "External Hard Drive 1".
Am I missing something? Does Time Machine only move on to another disk when the first one runs out of space? Do I have to turn one off in order to force it to back up to the other drive (that would be less convenient of course)?
I am hoping that I am missing something and that it will just alternate between the two. Otherwise it is not the most comforting and thorough backup system as I had hoped when I purchased the additional external hard drive.
I have a 1TB drive and a 500gig partition on another drive, both dedicated to backups (my Macbook HD is 475gig). It will take awhile for each to fill up and who knows what could happen during that time. Having Time Machine alternate between hard drives would be a nice small bit of security if the worst happened.
I realize that there are tons of other options for backing up but I just want to use Time Machine if I can.
Again thank you for your help!

You cannot use Time Machine in that way. I'm not sure where you heard that Time Machine alternates between drives automatically. What you can do is create a mirrored RAID array for the backup. This automatically duplicates whatever is on one drive onto the other drive.
Both drives must be the same size, and prefereably, exactly the same make and model. RAIDs can be configured using OS X's Disk Utility.
RAID Basics
For basic definitions and discussion of what a RAID is and the different types of RAIDs see RAIDs. Additional discussions plus advantages and disadvantages of RAIDs and different RAID arrays see:
RAID Tutorial;
RAID Array and Server:
Hardware and Service Comparison.
Hardware or Software RAID?
RAID Hardware Vs RAID Software - What is your best option?
RAID is a method of combining multiple disk drives into a single entity in order to improve the overall performance and reliability of your system. The different options for combining the disks are referred to as RAID levels. There are several different levels of RAID available depending on the needs of your system. One of the options available to you is whether you should use a Hardware RAID solution or a Software RAID solution.
RAID Hardware is always a disk controller to which you can cable up the disk drives. RAID Software is a set of kernel modules coupled together with management utilities that implement RAID in Software and require no additional hardware.
Pros and cons
Software RAID is more flexible than Hardware RAID. Software RAID is also considerably less expensive. On the other hand, a Software RAID system requires more CPU cycles and power to run well than a comparable Hardware RAID System. Also, because Software RAID operates on a partition by partition basis where a number of individual disk partitions are grouped together as opposed to Hardware RAID systems which generally group together entire disk drives, Software RAID tends be slightly more complicated to run. This is because it has more available configurations and options. An added benefit to the slightly more expensive Hardware RAID solution is that many Hardware RAID systems incorporate features that are specialized for optimizing the performance of your system.
For more detailed information on the differences between Software RAID and Hardware RAID you may want to read: Hardware RAID vs. Software RAID: Which Implementation is Best for my Application?

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Trying to plan in advance...
I was wondering if I can (with a laptop) use Time Machine for both:
1. Creating Time Machine backups on a partiion of an external drive. My plan was going to create 2 partitions: one to be used for Time Machine backups of another external hard drive (that holds all of my media) and then the other partition was going to be a bootable clone of my internal drive (totally separate from Time Machine)
and
2. Also use Time Machine for my Time Capsule, to create Time Machine backups of my internal drive.
Is this possible? I had heard that you can't use TM to make backups to a partition on an external drive, AND use it for another drive (like Time Capsule) at the same time. But I would think that this should be possible-
Thanks everyone-

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I would suggest you partition your new external drive and create a 2nd partition that's large enough to hold files you want to off load so you can free up space.
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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.)
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Don't tell us, tell them
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How to Delete a Time Machine Backup - YouTube
If you want to remove an entire Time Machine backup on a backup drive, then the easiest way to do that is to erase the backup drive using Disk Utility. However, this will delete everything on the disk:
Drive Erase Snow Leopard and Earlier
1. 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 Utilities menu.
If you are preparing an external or a non-startup drive, then open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
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Relying only on TM to me is iffy but I would bet you have clones in addition to TM like I do. I agree with everything you said but to the OP question, it is possible. A time capsule or AEBS+HD are pretty similar but one is officially supported while the later is not.
Since I'm rambling a bit I will add this. I only use TM for the times I delete something and then wish I had it back. All my restores or migrations are done from my clones. One clone is made weekly and is a snap shot of my system. One clone I keep remotely located and is updated monthly.
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How can I keep Time Machine from Automatically backing up any external drive connected

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