Time Machine, Mozy and external drives? Somehow I lost 300GB of data! :(

Hello:
I have 2 external 500 GB hard drives. One a USB drive used for Time Machine, the other a firewire 800 drive I use for HD video/iMovie files and editing. I also have Mozy (online backup service) installed and running in the background. Not sure what updates I have been running, but about 2 weeks ago I would start getting the spinning color wheel or "spinning beach ball of death" where the mouse pointer/curser would not return. All I could do to recover was hold the iMac power button dow to issue a hard reset. After several occurrences of this event I started yanking my peripheral devices and it seemed to be caused by one if not both external hard drives. 'Cause when I unhooked them, the busy curser went away. Anyway, after this happened for a few days then my external hard drives started randomly un-mounting. Eventually the firewire drive would never remount. WelI, I yank the drive out of the case it was in and put it in another case thinking maybe the external case has gone bad... the strange thing, I could still see the drive in "System Profiler" but it would never mount, even did a PRAM reset. Anyway, I got it in another case, USB only, and it showed up in "Disk Utility" but when I checked it, is said the file structure was bad and couldn't be repaired. So I had to reformat it. Now I'm trying to download 300GB from Mozy because the DVD option from them (Mozy) will cost over $200 (this is what they are charging for the DVD retrieval option)... BTW, the free download retrieval option keeps bombing out on me too, so now I'm not sure I will ever get my files back. Oh well... does anyone have a clue what may have happened here so I don't get in this predicament again... we can start with me not screwing things up but beyond that? Oh, I did hot plug the USB and firewire drives and got warnings about un-mounting first, but with a spinning color wheel I could not do anything like that. Sorry this is partially a vent post. This makes me disappointed in Apple and/or Mozy. This was my first Apple computer purchase and had hoped for something more robust. I can get this same treatment with a PC... at least with a PC I am a little better prepare, I expect this to happen. Anyway I'm done, for now.
mn3

mn3:
I'm sorry to hear about all your troubles!
In the future, if you have an issue that occurs twice or more in a short period of time, you need to start looking at what's going wrong so you can keep things safe.
With regard to those external drives:
You may want to invest in the application Disk Warrior; it can repair many errors that Disk Utility isn't able to touch.
Odds are what happened is you thoroughly corrupted the directories on the drives by yanking the USB cords instead of ejecting them properly. If the directory is corrupted, it's no easy task to get the data saved!
A few questions about the drives:
1) What are the brand names?
2) Have you used these drives with other machines in the past?
3) Do the drives have their own power supplies?
4) Were they connected directly to the iMac?
Some questions about your computer:
1) Have any other peripherals caused you troubles?
2) How large of a hard drive does the computer have & how much space is free?
3) How old is the iMac?
4) Do you have the original install discs?
Lots of questions, but the answers should be helpful.
~Lyssa

Similar Messages

Time Machine, iPhoto and External Drives

Hi!
My Mac Info:
Macbook Pro Retina OS X, Version 10.8.5, Processor 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5, Memory 8GB
I have 0KB out of 120.47GB.
Audio - 2.33GB
Movies - 37.12GB
Photos - 28.66GB
Apps - 6.98GB
Backups - 0KB
Other - 45.38GB
Ok...the scenario, let's say...
I backed up in Jan '14 on Time Machine on a G/Drive 1GB. (got it.)
In Feb '14, I ran out of space on my Mac, so I deleted photos to make room and did another backup, photos and everything. (got it.)
In Mar '14, I backed up again.
Question 1.
In the Mar '14, back up, it only backed up the photos from my iPhoto library that were current, it did not back up the deleted photos.
So how do I see a complete photo library? The deleted photos and everything on my G/Drive? This scenario was fictitious, however I'm in a situation where I've been deleting photos in iPhoto and backing up to make space since Dec 2012. I don't know how retrieve a true library that has everything! (The photos that I have deleted, btw, have not been duplicates.)
Oh, the reason, why I want a complete photo library is because I want to externally print a album of our 3 yr old son. But when I go to the back ups, I can't tell which files have still have the photos that I deleted. So, how can I piece together all of the photo libraries for 1 comprehensive library without showing duplicates?
Question 2.
My external drives
G/Drive, S/N 7DGVE8MA - 1TB (I use this for Time Machine).I have used 295GB
WD My Book, WD P/N WD5000h1Q-00 - 500GB, (Backup to my G/Drive).I have used 45GB
Are these good external drives?
Many, many thanks!

Your profile shows 10.6.8 - you might want to update it.
If you are backing up using Time Machine, do you have a backup prior to when you started deleting photos that you could restore?
There seem to be multiple problems with WD drives in the discussions, but whether WD is a bad brand is hard to say.

I have my Time Machine on an external drive (not connected to Airport Extreme) and I have an external HD attached to airport extreme. Is it possible to have Time Machine backUp computer HD AND external HD connected to Airport Extreme. How?

I have my Time Machine on an external drive (not connected to Airport Extreme) and I have an external HD attached to airport extreme. Is it possible to have Time Machine backUp computer HD AND external HD connected to Airport Extreme. How?

Is it possible to have Time Machine backUp computer HD AND external HD connected to Airport Extreme.
Sorry, but no.
Time Machine will backup your Mac, but not the hard drive attached to the AirPort Extreme.
Time Machine will back up a hard drive only if it is attached directly to your Mac via USB or FireWire.

My iphoto library disappeared. i am trying to restore my library from time machine -- from an external drive -- but everytime it tries to copy my library it tells me it can't do it because i don't have access to my iphoto library??!!! help!!

My iphoto library inexplicably disappeared! i am panicked but i do back up by time machine to an external drive and also to JustCloud. I am trying to restore my iphoto library from a back up on feb 28, 2014 and it says it's copying but then gives me a message that it can't do it because i "don't have authorization to access iphoto library"?! what does this mean? i really want to get my library back on my mac. Also if anyone knows why this happened or where my photos might be on my computer, i'd appreciate help with that, too.

Thank you Terence for your help. I was able to restore my backup from my time machine ext drive to a new 1tb seagate ext drive. so i felt sort of ok. but yesterday that older ext drive i used for time machine wouldn't open! i called applecare and they trouble shooted with me and said it's probably a goner and data is probably corrupted. it's only a few years old and i'm very careful with it. my husband accidentally dropped my new drive last night -- i know, unbelievable, i was SO upset, poor guy -- but I'm so stressed with all of this. i have 10 years of photos and videos. so now i only have the one newer drive with a backup. i have to buy another one today to backup again so i at least have two backups. i tried to delete a ton of files last night to free up the 30 gb of space i need to get my full library back on my mac. i have 90gb free and deleted 7 years worth of photos i had on picasa that were in my "pictures" folder and also a ton or random photos and videos i had in that same pictures folder and thought that would give me the 30 gb but it hardly freed up any space at all! do you know why that is? all of this stuff is really a pain and really stressful. thank god i did have a backup in the first place but now i am panicked the one i have left will somehow crash. especially after my husband dropped the drive lastnight! it didn't fall far and fell onto a wood floor and seems fine, but after my older ext drive crashed yesterday -- and i lost my entire iphoto library a fewweeks ago off my mac -- i feel cursed. any answers you have would be great. thank you.

External Drive with Time Machine, booting from external drive with utilitie

I'm using Time Machine now with
a LaCie 1TB external hard drive.
Everything works fine.
But, I've been wondering:
Can I place a program like TechTool
on the external drive (that Time Machine uses)
and boot from that external drive.
I would like to be able to do that,
because diagnostics and repair programs
only works properly and fully when they run from
external drives. Anything on the internal drive can be repaired
and examine. Impossible to do if Techtool is on the same
drive that's been examined.
Any thoughts as to what I should do?
Thanks
iMac, Leopard, Time Machine, Lacie Quadra 1TB drive.
P.S. Stupid question: If my computer crashes, and I reboot from Time Machine
(from the external drive) how does the computer know which backup to take ?!?
Isn't there many versions of the OS on the Time Machine backup taken at different times?

pitou wrote:
P.S. Stupid question: If my computer crashes, and I reboot from Time Machine
(from the external drive) how does the computer know which backup to take ?!?
Isn't there many versions of the OS on the Time Machine backup taken at different times?
As V.K. says, you can't boot from TM backups.
But you can restore your entire system from any one of them, per the procedure in #14 of the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
You can also selectively restore from them, while running normally. See #15 in the FAQ Tip.
You might want to review these:
Time Machine Tutorial
Time Machine 101
How to back up and restore your files
Time Machine Features
Apple - Support - Mac OSX v10.5 Leopard Time Machine
and perhaps browse the rest of the FAQ Tip.

How to use Time Machine with an external drive?

Hi…I’m new to this, I hope someone can help me=)
I’m trying to back up my Macbook Pro 10.6.8 using Time Machine with an external drive Seagate Backplus Slim. I’ve tried several solutions that I’ve found through different forums but still wouldn’t work.
Every time I opened Time Machine, it has this appearance:
Then when I click “Select backup Disk”, it goes on like this:
And after I click “Set Up Time Capsule”, it has this:
It keeps saying that it couldn’t find AirPort wireless, even though I have good WIFI connection.
Anyone know what I should do? Please help….Thanks everyone

Ayuphie ~ In your Time Machine Preferences panel, slide the OFF-ON switch to the ON position:

How do I convert a Time Capsule former Time Machine into an external drive?

I want to convert my 2TB Time Capsule (which I formerly used as a Time Machine) into an external drive. I now have a 3TB which I have set up as the Time Machine thus freeing the 2TB to hopefully work as an external drive. The 2TB now sits with the old Time Machine backup data intact but I no longer need that backup. I had it hooked up to my modem but not have hooked the ethernet up to my desktop (is that right?). Please advise how to prep the 2TB Time Capsule to be a normal external drive.

1) How do I turn the wireless on the TC on or off? Where do I go to change the settings.
Spend some time in the airport utility.. the easiest way is simply go through every screen until you are familiar with the controls.
Open airport utility.. click the TC.. click edit.
Click the wireless tab. Click on Network mode.. select Off..
2) I found the Touro 4TB and the price is quite inexpensive compared to other 3 and 4TB units. What's the reason for that? Am I missing something in the specs? They offer a Touro Deskpro and a Touro DX3. I can't tell from the description what the difference is - I can't see beyond 4TB. Is one preferable over the other?
They are competing with better known brands.. ask anybody hard disk brands they know.. and either Western Digital or Seagate come to mind. People easily forget there was hitachi (ex IBM). Although Hitachi sold their disk division but due to anti-trust laws it could not be sold entirely to WD who bought half of it.. Toshiba bought the other half. WD tries to hide the Hitachi drive name to bury it.. they bought to bury. But Toshiba keeps it alive.
I actually buy Hitachi drives (Toshiba now) in preference to the others. But everyone has their favourite. The Touro are just good value for money.. the case is not exactly the work of art.. buy LaCie for that. It is a bit over large and the plastic is plasticiky, if you get my drift. Silver plated plastic to make it look like metal is not my favourite.. but I am hardly concerned with the look..!! It looks like an external hide drive.. hide it if you find it ugly.
The difference between the Touro Pro and the Touro DX3 4TB drives is the speed of the drives, the pro is 7200rpm and the the DX3 should be 5400rpm.
I am not 100% sure of the above.. but it is likely to be different drives.. We have not seen DX3 in our market until recently.. they were all pro.
None with bigger than 4TB at this point..
3) OWC - never heard of this group - are the hard drives dependable in your experience?
Retailers who sell Touro and Toshiba and LaCie and every other brand.. sell online and to overseas.. good prices if not the cheapest.. have their own lines of shells, as well selling all the others.. have their own brand SSD but obviously bought in from elsewhere.. RAM, kits for all sorts of things.. huge catalog and very Apple orientated.
I am amazed if you have been on a Mac for more than 5min.. google ads have not flashed up OWC 20 times.. you must have good resistance to advertising.
Please google OWC.. if I post their actual URL the post will get deleted.
Look up say external drives.. they have one zillion of them.

Copying Time Machine files to external drive for use with PC

Hello! Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.
My MacBook Pro recently died. I have it backed up by Time Machine on an external drive. Now I'd like to copy my files from the backup to another external drive so that I can access them later from a PC computer running Windows (7 or 8). Is that possible? The Time Machine drive, I believe, is formatted specifically for Mac, but the external drive I'm trying to copy to is FAT32. Can I connect both to a friend's Mac, look for the files I need, and then copy them from the backup drive to the other external drive? Will a PC computer be able to read them?
Thanks!

Usually that error indicates a drive malfunction; specifically, the drive is spinning down and not responding to bus signals. Some "Eco" or "green" drives are known for this behavior. The following steps may help:
Select  ▹ System Preferences ▹ Energy Saver ▹ Power Adapter and uncheck the box labeled Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible, if it's checked.
If the drive is connected to a hub, connect it to a built-in port on the computer.
If a firmware update is available for the drive, apply it.
Contact the drive manufacturer to see whether there's a firmware setting you can change.
If you installed vendor software for the drive, uninstall it.
If none of the above steps resolves the issue, try another drive.

Time Machine backup and main drive corrupted. Help! (REWARD OFFERED)

Here's the deal:
I have a Macbook Pro and a Mac Mini both runnign Snow Leopard. I use the Mac Mini as a kind of media center / server, it has a few external drives connected to it. On of these drives (1GB) is dedicated to Time Machine, the Mac Mini (80 GB hard drive) backs up to it directly and the Macbook Pro (500 GB hard drive) does it over the network (Time Machine created a sparsebundle). This has worked well for years now. Occasionally I got the error that Time Machine needed to start a new backup because the old one was corrupt. That happened about 2-3 times a year (did the same thing when I backued up via USB). Now about 2 weeks ago, that error came up and I just let the Macbook Pro on overnight and connected the ethernet cable for faster transfer.
When I woke up, the Macbook Pro didn't respont at all, spinning beachball, no response at all beside mouse movement. I let it do it's thing for another 10 hours (while I was at work) and just held down the power button to power off and restart it. But all I got was the gray-on-gray flashing folder with the question mark in it, that's what you get when the Mac can't find bootable partitions. So I popped in the OSX Snow Leopard install disk, ran disk utility. It saw the hard drive, but no partition (i.e. Machintosh HD) on it. I checked the Time Machine backup and the sparsebundle was 300 GB (the Macbook Pro had 400 GB used, the remaining 100 GB were free). There is no way to restore from an unfinished Time Machine backup...
First thing I did was clone the internal (Macbook Pro) hard drive to a DMG disk image using DiskDrill (the only program I found that could recognize the drive at all, not even DiskWarrior could). I also bought the exact same hard drive model and partitioned it like the cloned the corrupted hard drive to the new one using ddrescue (a command line tool that doesn't quit upon i/o errors but proceeds and tries to recover as much as it can). It copied everything except 65 kilobytes, the corrupted drive seemed to be physically damaged in a bunch of sectors relatively at the beginning of the disk. Since I had now an exact copy on a fresh, healthy drive, I went crazy trying out Disk Warrior (didn't recognize the drive at all), data rescue, testdisc, p a Windows isk, etc. Only R-Studio (on windows) showed the EFI and Macintosh HD partitions on there, they started and ended on the same sectors on the corrupted drive and its clone. After some research, I figured that the partition table was corrupt so I reformated the clone disk using the OSX Snow Leopard install disk (1 HFS Journaled Partition with GUID Partition table). R-Studio showed the EFI and Macintosh HD on that reformated drive, again, same sectors as before. So I figured I could just copy just the bytes where the Macintosh HD starts from the corrupted drive to the clone (using ddrescue). That worked, after almost 24 hours, I had the clone drive with a "disk1" partition on it that even disk utility could see.
Now I was able to run Disk Warrior on it, but all it could do was recover a few Application folders (Resource-Folders and lproj-stuff), about 100 MB in total. It couldn't repair more of catalog file apparently. Luckily, Time Machine backed up quite a bit (300 GB out of 400 GB of data) and I was able to manually copy all the Dokuments, Desktop, user Library, Applications, Music, Download and Movies. Unfortunatley, only a little bit of the Pictures folder was copied. iPhoto library (80 to 100 GB) was nowhere to be found, backup must have failed right then. I can salvage the drives (time machine drive, original hard drive with a few broken sectors, DMG-image of that drive, 1-1 copy of that drive with partition table repaired) but that only gives me files with numeric names and today's date on teh JPEGs (instead of the date the picture was taken).
Is there any way I can recover that iPhoto library? It appears the catalog file got corrupted because the hard drive (only 8 months old...) failed on a few sectors. If I understand it correctly, the catalog file on HFS+ file systems is where the folder structure and file names are stored in a B-Tree. I can't imagine that some i/o error during backup can totally annihilate that file when it was working perfectly before. Here's a few things I want to try out but haven't figured out how so far:
- Time Machine had to start a new backup. There's plenty of free space on that drive so there's a good chance there's old data left on it. Is there a way to restore files (including file names) and fodlers from deleted time machine backups?
- Is there any way to re-build that catalog file from what is there left on the original hard drive? I can't imagine 65 kilobytes destroys it all.
- Are there other ways to recover my iPhoto Library? The raw JPEG (and AVI) files with correct file names or metadata would suffice.
Thanks in advance for any help, I'll actually reward the person with a working solution, 5 years of photo memories are somewhat important. It really ***** that a failure during a backup destroys that...

Final Update:
The catalog file on the original hard drive could not be fixed. Seems like Mac OSX tried to repair the catalog file while the sectors this file resides on failed. To make things worse the partition table was also broken beyond repair, even overwriting the sectors with a new correct partition table didn't help. DiskWarrior found less then 100 MB worth of stuff, mainly Applications folders.
I recovered pretty much everything from the incomplete Time Machine backup by right-clicking the sparsebundle and browsing through the folders with the long alphanumeric names, looking for the version of the folder with the most files in there. All I was missing was part of the ~/Pictures folder, i.e. photobooth pictures and the whole iPhoto Library. My best option was to recover these files using data recovery tools.
DiskDrill proved to be the absolute best, fast, responsive, efficient, and the only one able to mount the DMG-file with no valid file system on it. As there were many i/o errors and broken sectors on the original hard drive, I made a copy of it using a free command line tool called ddrescue (the standard dd tool just aborted when it encountered the i/o error). ddrescue copied the whole drive to a DMG image, I had 56 kilobytes with errors on the first pass, but it managed to shrink that down to just 4 kilobytes (wow!) after the second pass where it tries to re-read the broken secors. It took about 24 hours for a 512 GB 2.5" drive (5400 rpm) but well worth it. Be advised that ddrescue is really persistent and tries everything to recover those last errorneous bytes. At the very end of the process, the read/write head of the hard drive just goes wild trying to catch the data on the sectors with different momentum. This works but I assume this is pretty damaging for the original drive. I also copied it all to a new hard drive (again using ddrescue) and tried partition and catalog repair tools on that (DiskWarrion, testdiks, pdisk, etc.). Still no hint of a good result.
I made a deep scan on the clone hard drive with DiskDrill. At the end (after about 8 hours over USB) it found 13 partition (I assume that's the Macintosh HD, EFI and some DMG files lying around) and hundreds of thousands of pictures. I restored some JPG files just to check the quality, some were damaged, some were good with all the EXIF data intact. I just made it copy all JPG files into a folder. I know the pictures taken from my camera produce JPGs larger than 1 MB and smaller than 5 MB, so I sorted them by size and moved the smaller and larger files into seperate folders. I took the remaining folder (100 GB) and just dragged it into iPhoto. It imported them overnight. Auto-Split by events and I got my library back, alas with different file names, originals and edited versions side by side, lots of duplicates, some damaged, some not. But hey, all the pictures in chronological order. Okay there was also one large event with all the JPGs without valid EXIF data landed inside, iPhoto just takes the file creation date (i.e. the date where the recovered file was copied). As far as I can tell, these are all just data corpses, halfway overwritten copies, random pictures from the internet, desktop pictures, etc.
I started to work my way back through the events, deleting the duplicates and renaming the events. There's an app called "Duplicate Annihilator" which apparently can find duplicate pictures in iPhoto and mark them for you. The free version only does 500 pictures but if it works, I'll get the full version. It can mark th eduplicate photos by adding something to the picture comment in iPhoto so you can manually review it all. Good stuff!

I am out of space on my Macbook Air and have a Time Machine Backup. I want to complete reset my mac, but wonder if I can pick and choose what I restore to my computer? Can I also use my time machine backup and external storage as well?

I am out of space on my Macbook Air and have a Time Machine Backup. I want to complete reset my mac, but wonder if I can pick and choose what I restore to my computer? Can I also use my time machine backup as external storage as well for the files I don't need everyday?

If you are using "Restore from Time Machine Backup" option from OS X Recovery, you can only choose from the broad categories presented.
... Can I also use my time machine backup as external storage as well for the files I don't need everyday?
To be clear, if you are asking if you can use the volume containing your Time Machine backup to store additional, non-Time Machine files, the short answer is yes.
It's not a good idea though, since the Time Machine backup will eventually fill all available space, after which it begins to remove old, "expired" backups to make room for newer ones. The presence of additional files doesn't change that fact, and Time Machine will not erase them, but you will encounter a dilemma should you want to store additional files on that volume when there is no remaining space. You will have to make room for them on your own, by deleting existing files. Furthermore, since Time Machine cannot back up its own volume, those additional files will not be backed up by Time Machine.
The easy solution for what you describe is to purchase additional external storage. External USB hard disk drives have become very inexpensive; about $55 will buy a perfectly suitable 1 TB drive.
You can also choose to replace your MacBook Air's internal storage with a larger capacity one. Look for a suitable replacement from OWC / MacSales:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Air-Retina
That gets a little more expensive but it is the optimum solution.

HT201250 Will using Time Machine on my external drive, reformat or wipe my external drive?

I need to backup my whole computer, and was wondering if I can do this with Time Machine using my external hardrive. The problem is, that I am using this same external hardrive for other things and I don't want to lose that data. Will using Time Machine wipe my external hardrive? Apple did not make it so clear in their guide on using Time Machine, but I have a feeling that it must reformat the hardrive. If my hunch is correct, is their any other way I can backup my computer using an external hardrive without having to wipe it? I was thinking about just dragging Macintosh HD into a folder on my hardrive and letting the file transfer. What are the downsides of doing this?
NOTE: Don't know if this makes a big difference, but I am running OS X 10.8.3

If the drive is not formatted correctly for Time Machine, then it will have to format it. But, it won't do that automatically. It will ask if you want to use that disk for Time Machine when you attach it.
You can have Time Machine on a drive with other data. See Pondini's Time Machine FAQ: http://pondini.org/TM/3.html

According to the Genius Bar, my HD is dying. I need help with such things as making a boot disk, making sure back up is complete, etc. I have a White early 2008 MacBook running 10.7.3. It is backed up regularly with Time Machine to an external drive.

I am not a real tech type person. MAcBook white early 2008 running 10.7.3. I know I will need a boot disk to restart the computer after I have installed the new drive. I have purchased a Hitachi 500 G, 7200 RPM to install. The computer is backed up regularly using Time Machine to an external hard drive. I nned to know all the steps I need to do before physically changing the hardware.

Do you have your original drive backed up? Is it still working? If so I'd buy an external enclosure and boot from that. Then format your new drive and use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your old drive to the new one.
If you don't have a backup, I'd buy an external drive, use carbon copy cloner to do a backup, then install the new drive and clone back to it.

How to restore from Time Machine onto an external drive

Hi all,
I am a backup freak, and I don't feel entirely safe with Time Machine taking care of backing up my system unless I can test every now and then that I would be able to do a full restore. I've had problems in the past with .Mac/MobileMe's Backup.app, which would not be able to restore from an otherwise apparently successful backup, for one reason or another.
So, is there a way to test a full restore from Time Machine onto an external hard drive?
Thanks for your advice

Allamistakeo wrote:
Hi all,
I am a backup freak, and I don't feel entirely safe with Time Machine taking care of backing up my system unless I can test every now and then that I would be able to do a full restore. I've had problems in the past with .Mac/MobileMe's Backup.app, which would not be able to restore from an otherwise apparently successful backup, for one reason or another.
So, is there a way to test a full restore from Time Machine onto an external hard drive?
of course. connect an external, boot from the snow leopard DVD and choose "restore system from backup" from the utilities menu. follow the instructions and choose the external drive as the restore destination. make sure it's properly formatted. it should be formatted mac os extended with GUID partition scheme.
also, you might want to consider doing secondary backups in addition to TM by making a bootable clone on another external drive. use CCCloner or Superduper for such backups.
Thanks for your advice

Can I use Time Machine on an external drive that has files already on it.

Please excuse the silly question. New to mac, from PC.
I have a 200g external hard drive that has my itunes library, photos and other assorted files on it.
If I use time machine on this drive will it delete everything that is there, or can I use it in conjunction with the other files that are there?

You can use a Time Machine drive to save other files on it but I think time machine formats the drive when you first activate it so you will have to temporarily move your files while that happens. You best bet would be to partition the drive into a time machine portion and another for your files.
Steve

If I move my itunes and photo libraries to an external drive, will they still be backed up via time machine (on another external drive)?

I have 2 external drives, one of which I would like to use to store my iphoto and itunes libraries (to create space on my laptop hard drive). Then I have a 1tb drive that I'm going to use for my time machine backup. Will I be able to back up the itunes and iphoto libraries from the external drive onto the time machine drive with the rest of the files that are on my laptop hard drive? Thanks.

Depends on the version of the OS that you are using I would post on the forum for the version of the OS that you are using.
Later version od Time machine will, definitely. If the version you have doesn't, then there are plenty of 3rd party back up utilities that wll do the job for you.
If you're moving the iPhoto Library then remember the disk needs to be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Regards
TD

Time Machine, Mozy and external drives? Somehow I lost 300GB of data! :(

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for