Have Your Mac Powered On And Your Two Drives Plugged Into Your Mac. Amazons Choice for time machine external hard drive Seagate Portable 2TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD USB 3.0 for PC, Mac, PlayStation, & Xbox - 1-Year Rescue Service (STGX2000400) 4. Unfortunately, Windows only supports NTFS and FAT32 file systems, and it can not detect Mac formatted hard disks and disk images.
How To Backup An External Hard Drive On A Mac. When I tried to connect my external hard drive, Windows failed to detect it since Mac formats the hard drive in HFS+ format while creating the first Time Machine backup. Once your machine is clean, all subsequent backups will be clean, and the malware present in older "snapshots" will eventually be flushed from the backup during normal pruning, once the drive becomes full. Choice 1 Backup Your External Hard Drive And Your Macs Internal Drive. If your machine gets infected and the malware ends up backed up, it can't hurt you unless you restore your machine from Time Machine to a point in time when the machine was infected. Open Disk Utility, select the drive, and then go to Edit > Restore. Connect your hard drive and then restart your Mac while holding Command + R. Do not scan them with any antivirus software! How do I back up a Mac to an external hard drive without Time Machine Another way to put your Mac's contents on an external drive is using Disk Utility. Since Time Machine backups can be fragile, never let anything other than Time Machine mess with them. In that state, the red marked button will not work showing a message that the drive is still in use. Open Disk Utility and use this: Finder only ejects the container (last line) and the drive is still spinning. In my case, that is Time Machine to a Time Capsule plus an external drive, and Carbon Copy Cloner to a couple additional external drives. This is the only way to currently eject the Time Machine drive normally. With any backup system, it's important to have at least two different, redundant backups, created by at least two different backup programs. But then, when it's needed most, it fails and cannot be used to restore data.įor this reason, my advice is as follows: I've seen cases where people have somehow edited these backups outside of Time Machine itself, and the backup continues to work for a while. Worse, it can do so without making the problem immediately obvious. Allowing a third-party program to alter the backups in any way can destroy the entire backup set. Time Machine backups have a special, unique structure that can be very fragile if it is disturbed, and changes should not be made to Time Machine backups by anything other than Time Machine. You should not allow anything to scan Time Machine backups!