You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

briandsk Author

Level 1

0 points

Time Machine backup with dual internal drives

Question re Time Machine on older two ssd capable MBP. I've searched a lot online and can't find an answer re how to backup a dual hard drive mid 2009 macbook pro (El Capitan 10.11.6 - I replaced optical drive with ssd) to a single external hard drive. There are a lot of instructions re backing up separate computers which seems to be something TM handles naturally because the external drive is physically inserted into 2 separate computers - TM knows the backup drive destination stays the same.

In my hardware setup I cannot find a way to make TM keep the same external backup drive location. Instead, it wants to use the 2nd internal drive as the sole backup destination (or use both) when it prompts me to select a disk. Perhaps it's not possible for dual drive Macs to do this. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Posted on Dec 4, 2021 4:06 PM

Top-ranking reply

Grant Bennet-Alder

Level 10

133,333 points

Posted on Dec 4, 2021 5:26 PM

Time machine backs up your entire Mac. All users, all drives that are not Time machine backup drives, unless they are on its exclusion list.

The only drives it does Not back up are drives that are different non-Mac formats, such as Windows drives.

What is the issue you are encountering?

View in context

Time Machine backup with dual internal drives

Similar questions