External Drives and Time Machine

OK, that confirms that the drive is being backed up.

I am traveling at the moment and do not have things set up to duplicate the same type of setup that you have. I'm working from memory here, so we may need LaPastanagues help as well.

Eject the external drive from your Mac to simulate a situation where the drive might have failed and you need to get to the Time Machine backups of the external drive.

Open Time Machine and go back a few days

Look under the Locations heading on the left panel of a Finder window.

Click on Macintosh HD.....or.....it might the name of your Mac

When you click on Macintosh HD or the name of the Mac, you should see two folders appear in the window to the right. One is your Mac and other will be the name of the external hard drive

Right-Click on the name of the external drive and a drop down menu will appear.

Look for a Restore To option. Click on this to restore the backup of the drive to another destination on your Mac or another hard drive that is connected to the network.

You can also open the drive to look for a specific item to Restore To if you don't need to restore the entire drive

Alternately, you can click to highlight the name of the drive and then click the "Gear" icon at the top of the window and select the Restore To option that way

I might be off on a small detail or two. Hopefully, LaPastenague is watching this thread because he knows all the answers and may be able to add a detail or two.

Is it possible to back up External Drives to a Time Capsule using Time Machine?

Yes......IF......the external drive is connected directly to your Mac via USB, USB-C, Thunderbolt, etc......AND......the external drive has been formatted for Mac in Mac OS Extended (Journaled), also known as HFS+.

Time Machine cannot backup an external drive if it is formatted in any other way.

If so, wha don't I see my External Drives when I open Time Machine... without my External Drives connected???

Couple of reasons.

You won't "see" them in Time Machine if they have not been backing up.

If Time Machine has been backing up the external drive and you have disconnected the drive from your Mac, there are a few "tricks" or steps that you must go through to "see" the drive in the Time Machine backups.

This might simulate a situation where the external drive has failed, and you need to get to the backup of the external drive in Time Machine, so that you can restore the backup of the drive to another destination.

So, we need clarification first on whether the drive has been backing up. If that is the case, then we can tell you how to "see" the drive in a Time Machine backup of the external drive even though the external drive might not be connected at the time.

Time Machine can be a pain because it does not allow a number of different jobs.. everything must be piled together.

Bob can work though how to see the external drive in Time Machine backup.

But let me recommend you don't use Time Machine. There are plenty of alternative backup software at very reasonable license fees. SuperDuper is old favourite with Mac people. Carbon Copy Cloner is the one I use. CCC can run a task to backup an External drive (of any format the Mac can read) to the TC.. and keep it separate from your main hdd. This makes restores so much easier. And for most people external drive won't change much.. so once a day backup is usually plenty.. but this is up to you.

Please clarify whether you can "see" the drive if you open Time Machine and move back a few days when the drive is connected to your Mac.

If you are using Mojave on the Mac, the drive should show up in any Finder window in Time Machine under the Locations heading on the left panel of the Finder window.

If you are running an older operating system, the drive might be under the Shared heading or Devices heading.

If the drive is connected to the Mac when you open Time Machine, and you cannot see the drive in a Finder window, then a guess would be that the drive is not being backed up. I don't know why.

Great, glad that we figured this out.