Backup and Transferring files on external drive

If your goal is to use the same external drive for both Time Machine (TM) backups and for general file storage, that would not be a good idea in the long run as TM will try to use all available space on that drive over time. If you still want to do so, then it would behoove you to first partition the drive so that it has two partitions: one for TM & the other for file storage.

i'll have to vote for Tesserax' response. putting all you eggs in one basket is a recipe for disaster. and while you can do it, when you consider how affordable external drives have become it makes sense to use one for TM and a separate one for supplemental storage. if it's just for storage, you can get an HDD to save the cost vs an SSD. and i firmly believe there's no such thing as having too much external storage.

In my case, I have several baskets of eggs. :-) I use two Time Machine backup volumes on different external SSDs. One is the "normal" Time Machine backup. The other, I connect each morning to make a backup and then disconnect. I would be out of luck if there were 3 failures at the same time (internal SSD, always connected SSD, and connected once-per-day SSD).

BTW, important data volumes on the external SSDs themselves are copied (usually daily) to the internal SSD as disk images. The disk images are not further backed-up to Time Machine.

I also use Finder tags to gather together other important folders which I copy to iCloud Drive (usually once per week).

- Pie Lover

that sounds like a very robust backup strategy. and i bet you have a very low chance of losing data if one of your drives fails. but many users would find that strategy overly cumbersome. in my case, i think i would follow a similar regiment to yours if my machine was mission critical. but, as my mac is only an extension of my home entertainment system, a single TM is enough for me. most of my data is on external drives, with almost nothing being stored on my local drive. and everything i have stored on each of my many external drives is duplicated on a second identical drive. so basically i would say it all boils down to the end user's needs and preferences. :)

Agreed. Even I find it a bit cumbersome. :-)

I have thousands of media files which consist mostly of photographs. I've also been backing up the original photos to BDR M-Discs. Unfortunately, a 25 GB optical disc gets filled up rather quickly these days (100GB M-discs are available but they're rather expensive).

I'm still looking for an approach that best serves my needs and budget. :-)

- Pie Lover

CarbonCopyCloner (bombich.com, $40) does not create bootable clones easily under Monterey, but it can move and incrementally move (only changed/new) data files fro internal to an external, or from one external to another external.

yes, with myself being retired, budget is an extremely important part of my storage solution. to save money on storage, i buy seagate enterprise class desktop HDDs (from amazon.ca) which i then put in insignia powered enclosures. (from best buy) both the drives and the enclosures are at very reasonable prices. and i also currently have two samsung T7 SSDs. one is used for a catalina boot drive. the other a spare. as far as SSDs go, they were fairly affordable as well.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm retired as well.

I also like Samsung SSDs. The T5 model is fairly expensive and doesn't take up much space. Performance is also quite impressive, especially when directly connected to a USB 3.1 (Gen 2) port (on a Mac mini (2018)) using the supplied Type-C cable.

- Pie Lover

..or create an APFS container with multiple volumes (see below). The Time Machine volume can be created with a disk quota (via Terminal) to avoid using up all the free storage.

- Pie Lover