HT201250 Can time machine back up external hard drives too?

I'm new to Time Machine. Can I set it up to back up both my internal HD and an external HD?
Thanks,
Carol

Yes but it's poor advice by Apple for the reason hardware fails just as often as software, if you drop that drive, you have ruined all your backups at the same time.
If you get malware, you have just infected all your backups at the same time.
Apple created TimeMachine and didnt provide a Windows version, in my opinion it's to trap as much as your data as possible so you can't decide to later to switch to a Windows PC without a great deal of pain and effort.
So the more drives you backup with Apple's TimeMachine the more data is trapped in it when the hardware or software fails.
The best advice is to have a multiple backup system and match each piece of hardware with two of it's own seperate hardware backups.
So if you have a boot drive, you need two external backups of it.
If you have a storage drive for extra space, then you need two more drives as backup of that.
Drives are cheap, data is not.
If you drop the only backup, get a power surge, or a criminal breaks in or a fire and it's dead or gone, or get malware, you won't know until it's already infected the first backup restored that it's still on the loose and need ot take stronger measures, your going to wish you had the second backup safe and sound someplace.
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