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Time Machine

I ran the etracheck app and it comes up with this screen shot for time machine no config? How do I config it? I use a external drive from western digital and never use time machine. So can i set it up even if I use external drive?


Posted on Dec 11, 2018 7:11 AM

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TimeMachine should be used with an external drive. You could set TM to use the WD external. Open System Preferences, select the TM tab, on then click on the Select Disk icon. You'll see a window with "Available Drives" and your WD drive should be there. Select it. TM will automatically start its first backup within a couple minutes. Depending on how much data you have on your internal drive, this process might take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours. Since subsequent backups are incremental, all backups after this one will not take much time at all.


Note: depending on what you are storing on the WD drive, it might be a better idea to purchase a second external drive for TM. If you are currently using it as a quick dirty backup drive by copying important files to it, go ahead and use it for the TM drive and stop copying files to it. But if it is also being used for data - for example I keep all my music on an external drive - then you should use another drive for TM and have it backup both the internal drive and that data external.

Posted on Dec 11, 2018 7:56 AM

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Question marked as Best answer

Dec 11, 2018 7:56 AM in response to frank_the_snake_master_01

TimeMachine should be used with an external drive. You could set TM to use the WD external. Open System Preferences, select the TM tab, on then click on the Select Disk icon. You'll see a window with "Available Drives" and your WD drive should be there. Select it. TM will automatically start its first backup within a couple minutes. Depending on how much data you have on your internal drive, this process might take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours. Since subsequent backups are incremental, all backups after this one will not take much time at all.


Note: depending on what you are storing on the WD drive, it might be a better idea to purchase a second external drive for TM. If you are currently using it as a quick dirty backup drive by copying important files to it, go ahead and use it for the TM drive and stop copying files to it. But if it is also being used for data - for example I keep all my music on an external drive - then you should use another drive for TM and have it backup both the internal drive and that data external.

Time Machine

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