TM backups working with external startup drive?

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Level 1

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TM backups working with external startup drive?

I bought new mini with idea to have system in internal and homers in external drive.

Seems to be that fixing home folder permissions, homers have to be in startup drive.

Since there's not enough space in internal to fit both system and homedirs, I'll have to use the external as startup drive.

And I'd like to keep using Time Machine for backups.

This tells that maybe I can't make a full restore to external disk, if it's APFS:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8417393

Anybody know does TM backups work even with single files, if you need to restore them to external?

And does TM make full backups of external APFS startup drive in Mojave?

Should I rather format that startup drive as HFS+?

Mac mini 2018 or later

Posted on Aug 30, 2019 4:29 AM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,084 points

Sep 6, 2019 2:32 PM in response to Toke Lahti

I have no idea why it would run slow. Mine took less than a minute. It wasn't an empty home folder. I had used it for years.

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Answer 2

Toke Lahti Author

Level 1

127 points

Sep 9, 2019 4:14 AM in response to Barney-15E

And you had iCloud working on that account?

And T2-chip on the machine?

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Answer 3

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,084 points

Sep 10, 2019 5:56 PM in response to Toke Lahti

No T2 chip. iCloud was signed in.

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Answer 4

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,084 points

Sep 2, 2019 5:25 AM in response to Toke Lahti

diskutil resetUserPermissions / 508

That is the syntax for the command.

In unix, when you put backticks around a command, it executes that in place and uses the returned value in the outer command.

id -u

returns the current users UID.

I ran the command from another user account, so I used the UID of the user I wanted to fix whose home folder was on an external drive.

It doesn't matter where the home folder exists. The user is on the startup volume, so that is used as the file path. The command finds the UID on that volume, gets the information on where the home folder is located, and applies the permission fixes to that home.

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TM backups working with external startup drive?

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