Q: Consolidating external hard drives

I don't think I made it clear that they all contain different stuff. Oh, there is some overlapping, but the external harddrive I'm using now only contains stuff that came from this computer, which I got in August of 2015. I remembered that when I went looking for an E-mail address and couldn't find it. That would be the beauty of consolidating files. If it worked, that would be the only way to go. I just don't know if it can be done. Yes, I know that you can load a harddrive from many sources, but would it be any good?That's the question.

Well, I'm probably wrong, but I have the impression that Time Machine organizes by date rather than application. I don't like the idea of having to go search for something that way. What I'd like is for all of the, say, photos to be in one place, so that  so matter when a photo was added to my computer, I would be able to find it in my external hard drive in the photo section. Sure, they could be organized by dates WITHIN the application, but they would all be filed together in the space for photos. If this is, in fact, the way things are set up, why is the column on the right-hand side organized by date? What am I missing? Why do you have to pick a date to find a photo?

Thanks for that. I'm just going to have to read that book I mentioned earlier. I still don't understand the need for that vertical calendar on the right side of the Time Machine screen. To me, the reasonable and expected thing would be to type the desired file name into the Time Machine search bar, not the computer's search bar.  That calendar implies, to me at any rate, that you can't find the file unless you know the date that something or other happened or was done to it. If you want to find the osmosis file, you type osmosis. Why can't it be that simple? Something like Spotlight USED to be. Spotlight can no longer be depended upon to find things. It's just not as useful as it once was., More Apple tinkering? I mean, they ruined iTunes with continual and unnecessary tweaks, so maybe that's what they've done to Spotlight. If something is doing a great job, LEAVE IT ALONE.

Okay, what you're saying gives me hope. So you can just type in what you're looking for, go to that stack, and  sift through it until you find exactly what you're looking for. That makes sense. That's the way it should be, assuming that all uploads from different hard drives someone find their way to their proper place. I'm in the midst of a project that should take me through the weekend to complete, but when it's finished, I'm definitely going to read that damned book from cover-to-cover.

Well, I've already said enough, too much, so the LAST thing I'm going to say is that your method sounds like the worst possible way to me. It's not simple or even practical. How often would I know that date? Almost never, I'd say. THE END.