HT1175 How do I get Time Machine to backup Documents and Photos?

My backups do not include photos and my documents folder. How can I get them included in the backup?

Time Machine will backup everything on the Mac unless you specifically Exclude the files from being backed up. If the Documents and Photos folder are not being backed up, then someone placed them on a list of items to be Excluded from backups.
These folders will appear in the list of Excluded items.
Click the Time Machine "clock" icon at the top of the Mac's screen
Click Time Machine Preferences
Click Options
Click on the Documents folder to highlight it, then click the - (minus) button at the bottom of the list to remove the Documents folder from Excluded items.
Time Machine will now back up the Documents folder on the next pass.
Do the same for the Photo folder and it wil be backed up on the next pass as well.

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Click Options
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Hi..
Thanks for the reply..
My original I Phone 5 was running IOS 6.12
My I phone 5S currently runs IOS 8..When I upgraded it, it had IOS 7 on it which made the I Photo app compatible with everything below IOS 8...( which the photo app is not compatible with ) so I just connected the I Phone 5S to my computer and thinking the new phone had IOS 7 on it that these was nothing to worry about..I thought all 900 + pictures in the photo stream would transfer but somewhere in the process, I Tunes decides to just go and install IOS 8 which requires that you run a " Photo Migration App" to transfer photos from IOS 7 & below. The problem was is that I didn't want IOS 8 on my new 5S so I thought I wouldn't have to do that part..
Anyway the phone emerged with IOS 8 on it and the only photos that remained were the ones that were actually on the phone..The 900 + I had in the stream didn't transfer because the Photos that works on IOS 7 and below isn't compatible with IOS 8..I guess you have to use the photo migration app that comes with IOS 8 & I phone 6..But I didn't ask to upgrade to IOS 8...It just did it on it's own!
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I know this sounds confusing but I'm at a loss as to what to do..This is what I found ...http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201386
but it doesn't help me..
Steve

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Hi I'd like to jump in here. Your app showed me this:
Time Machine:
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          Mobile backups: OFF
          Auto backup: YES
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HT201250 how do I get Time Machine to back up files (e.g. iPhoto) stored on an external hard drive?

Installed a new 3TB external hard drive for Time Machine. I have 2 other external hard drives attached to my iMac that contain iTunes and iPhoto. How can I point Time Machine to those external drives to include in the backup?

What is listed in System Preferences > Time Machine > Options... > Exclude these items from backups:?
Any attached external disk not listed there should be backed up.

HOW CAN I USE TIME MACHINE TO BACKUP ONLY PART OF MY FILES ON EXTERNAL D?

Hi, I am using time machine to back up all my files at the moment. but I want to get rid of video and photo material from my laptop and keep it on the external hard drive to which the time machine backs up my stuff.
how can i do this without losing the video and photo files permamnently?
thank a lot!

nefsi wrote:
doesn't time machine back up my files on the External hard disk?
By default, Time Machine backs-up almost everything on your internal HD to your External HD. It can also back up things on an external HD, if you want it to.
What I would like is, to find a way so that I could back up everything, but not have all the videos and photos I do not use often, on my laptop. instead I want to put them on the external hard drive and have time machine update all the other files.
Yes, you can do that, but there are two considerations:
You should partition the external HD so the TM backups are in one partition, and the other files are in the other partition. A partition (also called a volume), is treated like a separate disk for most purposes. See #3 in the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip* at the top of this forum.
You should find another way to back-up the videos and photos in that other partition, such as archiving them to CDs/DVDs.
In other words, can Time machine back up only some of my files?
Yes. You can exclude things from Time Machine. See #10 in the FAQ Tip. If you partition your TM drive, the other partition on it should be excluded automatically; but if it isn't, you can easily add it to the +Do not back up+ list in TM Preferences > Options.
For detailed instructions on making another partition on your external HD, see #6 in the FAQ Tip. It shows how to add a TM partition to a drive that already has other data on it, but the procedure is the same.

Can you get Time Machine to backup to a disk image?

I just bought an OWC external enclosure that holds two SATA drives. I upgraded my internal (main) HD to a 1TB drive, and then put my old internal 500 gig (main) HD and my old internal 500 gig (time machine) HD into the external enclosure.
So I'm good, with an external time machine raid array, that I can take off site.
But, I really wanted to encrypt the data, so as if someone broke into my car and stole my offsite backup, not have my data.
I thought about creating a 1TB (well, 930 gigs) encrypted image in disk utility on the external, mounting it, and choosing that for time machine. When I leave, shutdown would dismount the image, then turn off drive, unplug and leave.
But time machine won't allow me to choose the image.
I read about a terminal hack for backing up to unsupported network volumes....I tired that just for kicks, didn't work.
Is there any way to get time machine to allow me to choose a mounted disk image as my backup volume?
Thanks!

Likewise, I'm interested in the same question, but for a different reason: backing up to a NAS. Since a disk image gives you a nice virtual HFS+ partition, it seems a lot less suicidal than trying to shoehorn a Time Machine backup into whatever the NAS's native filesystem happens to be.
In theory it should be possible, since nested disk images (even mixing sparsebundle and plain old DMG) work just fine normally. And having your data in a nice monolithic DMG file would make it easier to copy and move the TM backups -- not to mention, you cap the max size and do encryption easily, as you described.
But it's almost impossible to find this information on the Web -- Googling for this topic results in a bunch of noise about Time Machine's sparsebundle images. I managed to find one similar thread:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=91297
But that thread, like this thread, so far doesn't have any solution.
I'm going to try to copy an existing TM backup to the disk image and see if that works. Will post again later, and hope that someone might have a solution someday.
Incidentally, if all you want is encryption, apparently you can get an encrypted TM backup by manually creating the sparsebundle file and turning on encryption. See the parent thread to this comment:
http://www.macosxhints.com/comment.php?mode=view&cid=98733
Anyway, let's hope someone might have a time-machine-inside-a-disk-image solution someday...

HT1175 How do I get Time Machine to backup Documents and Photos?

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