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singer-NT Author

Level 1

4 points

Time Machine/External Hard Drive

Does a time machine back up to an external hard drive (Western Digital Passport) protect all users on the MacBook Pro, or must each user make a back up?

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Jan 8, 2023 6:21 PM

Top-ranking reply

Grant Bennet-Alder

Level 10

133,351 points

Posted on Jan 8, 2023 7:07 PM

Time machine saves the contents of your MAC, not just one user. It also saves the contents of any Mac-format drives that are connected, unless you exclude them.

Windows format drives do not have the Mac data structures needed for quickly identifying what folders have changed, so time machine can not back them up.

Time Machinet is built very deeply into MacOS, and could not do its job running from an Application. You control it from:

system preferences > Time machine.

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Time Machine/External Hard Drive

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