On Jan 1, 2021, at 12:57 PM, William Spencer <wspence...@gmail.com<mailto:wspence...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Hi there: I’ve got Big Sur installed now, and I’m hoping to be able to use Time Machine to do my backing up rather than Carbon Copy Cloner, which is what I’ve been using for quite a while now. But I can’t see how to configure TM to do what I need. Here’s the setup: * I have three physical HDs, one internal to the Mini and two external. * One of the externals is partitioned, so the system actually thinks I have four HDs. * The idea is to back up the internal to one partition and the standalone external to the other partition. Time Machine is a real ‘fire and forget’ backup system…you turn it on and you don’t have to fuss with it ever again. Time machine backs up the booted volume (plus any mounted external volume, optionally, see link below) IS the standalone external another bootable drive? Then, unfortunately what I would do is back it up with CCC (or it’s own Time Machine Configuration while booted) That way you can do the back up internal to one partition, the external to another. and be able to recover them both as bootable drives; you cannot use a bootable volume backed up as a mounted external drive in Migration Assistant (which is how you restore an entire volume from Time Machine) * TM isn’t showing me one of the (partitioned) HDs as a possible destination for a backup. Likely it is because it’s not the correct format (see below) * It also isn’t showing me the internal HD as a source. You don’t select a source in Time Machine. It backs up the currently booted volume. By default it excludes external drives but you can undo that in the preferences: https://www.macworld.com/article/3153995/how-to-make-sure-time-machine-backs-up-external-drives.html (you can also exclude items on the boot drive that way as well. My email folders, for example are excluded, because all my email “lives” on the server, so restoring my email is merely a matter gdropping the account, re-adding it and re-synching the folders. This doesn’t work if you use POP or have local non-synched folder (they show as ‘On my Mac’ in the list in Mail) * The two it's showing (which are for what used to be called iTunes, one the source and the other the destination) are formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled); the two it isn’t showing (for the HD itself, ditto) are formatted as APFS. I”m not sure why, Big Sur is supposed to use APFS fro Time Machine, at least per the Ars Techhnica Big Review: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/macos-11-0-big-sur-the-ars-technica-review/9/#h1 * Is that difference in format a (or the) issue? * If I reformat anything I will lose all that data, as you know. * How can I proceed? Honestly, what I would do is purchase a new larger external HDD (mine is a 4TB one I got at Costco for ~$80-$90 I think, on sale) and set it up as one or two time machine volumes. (depending on why you want those two drives backed up to different partitions) Time Machine is a multi-point backup/restore system (It’s been a very long time since I've used CCC for this purpose) It maintains a database of changed files and folders and only backs up the changes as it goes. So you want to have (imo) at a minimum 2X your backed up data as free space, 3X is closer to optimal. So I’d look at how much you have to back up to start, and size it from there. -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs -- You received this message because you are a member of the iMac Group, a group for those using Apple iMacs and eMacs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to imaclist@googlegroups.com To leave this group, send email to imaclist+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/imaclist --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "iMac Group" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to imaclist+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/imaclist/6C7DDF10-3960-430E-87F2-F1C10A4F8FB8%40pharmacy.arizona.edu.
