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Please advise on correct settings for backing up Mac desktop and an External hard drive (which is home to my 693.01 GB system photo library) to an 8TB desktop storage. I am currently running MacOS Mojave and would like to upgrade to MacOs Big Sur.
Thank you for your time,
iMac 27″, macOS 10.14
to keep your photos library and add TM backups to it, there would need to be a partition available to create the TM backup. and if the drive is formatted HFS+, it would need to be reformatted as APFS for big sur. in both of those cases the drive would have to be erased and set up for that. with how cheap EHDs have become, you should buy a separate external drive with double the capacity of the mac's internal drive and do your time machine on it.
to keep your photos library and add TM backups to it, there would need to be a partition available to create the TM backup. and if the drive is formatted HFS+, it would need to be reformatted as APFS for big sur. in both of those cases the drive would have to be erased and set up for that. with how cheap EHDs have become, you should buy a separate external drive with double the capacity of the mac's internal drive and do your time machine on it.
Thank you, I will buy a 2TB EHD for TM.
Do you have any recommendations for safeguarding and backing up my EHD that holds my 693GB photo system library? I store my photos in ICloud, but what if the EHD that stores my system photo library crashes?
you could buy another EHD with the same capacity of your photos library disk and manually move the library to it. but, i don't use iCloud so i have no idea how that would apply. someone else here will understand that. just wait for a reply from whoever that happens to be. :)
edit: i do think a physical disk along with the photos on iCloud would suffice, but i'm not positive.
I do have it backed up on another EHD, but with the many changes and edits it's near impossible to keep backing up the entire drive. I will keep this post open.
Thanks so much for your time, Jeffrey! It's much appreciated.
you're welcome.
Backing up Mac and external hard drive to Time Machine via a 8TB desktop storage
