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Backing up Mac Studio in Monterey or Ventura

I was wondering because the Mac Studio M1 has a relatively small disk drive and I do photography and music, I need to put those files on an external hard drive which will likely be "permenantly" attached to the Studio. If I use Time Machine to do periodic back ups, how do I make sure the attached Hard Drive is also backed up, or is that even possible? Thanks for any help.

Posted on May 14, 2023 4:58 PM

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Posted on May 14, 2023 5:13 PM


Time machine backs up your COMPUTER, not your user-id. This includes every Mac-formatted drive, but does NOT include any external drives left in Windows New Technology File System (NTFS) and accessible only through the drive-maker's utilities.


Best Practice has always been to ERASE any new drive with Disk Utility. This allow the required MacOS data structures, especially the Mac File System Event Store to be maintained for the drive, and makes identifying what folders have changed and need to be backup in very fast.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

May 14, 2023 5:13 PM in response to spinosaurus


Time machine backs up your COMPUTER, not your user-id. This includes every Mac-formatted drive, but does NOT include any external drives left in Windows New Technology File System (NTFS) and accessible only through the drive-maker's utilities.


Best Practice has always been to ERASE any new drive with Disk Utility. This allow the required MacOS data structures, especially the Mac File System Event Store to be maintained for the drive, and makes identifying what folders have changed and need to be backup in very fast.

May 14, 2023 5:22 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Thanks Grant you must be the major knowledge base for Macs and maybe Windows too. So I always reformat my recent hard drives to APFS which I understand to be Mac specific and if I use it connected to the Mac Studio and do a backup it will be included in the back up. Is that a correct conclusion? I've never tried backing up with an attached hard drive previously as I always had larger internal disk drives so that's why I wasn't sure.

Backing up Mac Studio in Monterey or Ventura

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