Q: External drive manual backup with Yosemite
Have been looking into what kind of external drive to use in terms of upgrading from Mountain Lion to Yosemite. My Mac Mini Late 2012 has USB 3, Firewire 800 and Thunderbolt. Would prefer to use Firewire or Thunderbolt, but the cost of using external drives with these capabilities is beyond my budget. So I have been looking at USB 3 options. The problem is that all four of my USB ports are currently in use (keyboard, printer, USB hub and external CD drive). So it looks like if I want to use an external drive, I will have to remove an item from a USB port in order to plug in the external (most likely the CD drive).
Should I be OK if I do a manual backup of Time Machine or any other automatic backup? In other words, I would just mount and dismount the external whenever I wanted to make a backup?
Any other suggestions?
Mac mini (Late 2012), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)
Posted on May 10, 2015 7:44 AM
Why not plug the keyboard and printer into the USB hub? (Your first post says one of the ports is taken up by a USB hub.)
I would strongly recommend that you leave the external drive plugged in all the time
Plenty of USB3 hubs will supply power to an external drive. I like the Anker range of hubs.
Posted on May 10, 2015 9:16 AM