Time Machine Questions.....

[Reesche]

Hi you guys.... I have been using Time Machine for a long time but recently came across an issue...

This has to do with one of my MAC work stations. TM is not letting me select the Hard Drive 3 on this work station. I have given you some screen shots of my system to look at. The only HD it lets me deal with is HD 2..... And I do not what to include this disc in the back-up. I DO what to include HD 3. Is this something in the "Viewing" options that is not letting me select HD 3? Let me know. Thank You!

 

[TonyAguila]

Hi you guys.... I have been using Time Machine for a long time but recently came across an issue...

This has to do with one of my MAC work stations. TM is not letting me select the Hard Drive 3 on this work station. I have given you some screen shots of my system to look at. The only HD it lets me deal with is HD 2..... And I do not what to include this disc in the back-up. I DO what to include HD 3. Is this something in the "Viewing" options that is not letting me select HD 3? Let me know. Thank You!

Without knowing the specs of HD 3, I will hazard a guess that you just need to format/erase it using Disk Utility. I recommend setting it up as APFS, unencrypted. If you want Time Machine drives to be encrypted, you can do this at the time when you add it to the list.

 

[Reesche]

Hi Tony..... thanks for your reply. I am attaching more screen shots of more info for you to look at. Rebuilding HD 3 is the last thing I want to do. Anyway.... check these out. Let me know what you see. Reesche

 

[TonyAguila]

Hi Tony..... thanks for your reply. I am attaching more screen shots of more info for you to look at. Rebuilding HD 3 is the last thing I want to do. Anyway.... check these out. Let me know what you see. Reesche

HD 3 apparently contains very little data—2.8 TB available out of 3 TB. If you are confident in the integrity of HD 2, I think you can safely reformat HD 3 and start over with a new set. Or if you want to be safer, I suggest trying another drive as your second TM drive, before doing anything with HD 3.

It has been a while since I’ve seen a Time Machine drive recognized as a startup drive. What seems weird is that how come your main drive is not showing up on the list of startup drives?

 

[Reesche]

Hi Tony..... I only have the 2 drives on my Mac.... 2& 3 but we use #3 as the startup drive. See the attachment above.... Startup Disk.

I am going to try to set startup disk to HD 2...... and see if HD 3 will appear.

Reesche

 

[TonyAguila]

Hi Tony..... I only have the 2 drives on my Mac.... 2& 3 but we use #3 as the startup drive. See the attachment above.... Startup Disk.

I am going to try to set startup disk to HD 2...... and see if HD 3 will appear.

Reesche

So that’s probably it—the problem, I mean. Your system drive needs to be independent of Time Machine. I have two external hard drives for Time Machine, and Time Machine alone. Whenever there’s a hint of one showing odd behavior, I simply erase it and prepare it again as a fresh backup drive. Not much danger there since the other drive will not be running on its own for very long.

I don’t know the specs of your Mac, so I can’t suggest possible configurations for you.

 

[Reesche]

Hey Tony..... I think I would like to re-format my HD3 and use Carbon Copy Cloner.

Can you tell me If this is correct?

1. Back-up HD3 to another external disc

2. Erase HD 3 and format it to APFS? I am noticing that most of my HD's are File System: Journaled HFS+ OS: El Capitan 10.11.6 See Screen shot of HD3 Specs below. Let me know.

3. Reload the Backed up external HD with CCC.

Thanks Tony for your help on this

 

[TonyAguila]

Hey Tony..... I think I would like to re-format my HD3 and use Carbon Copy Cloner.

Can you tell me If this is correct?

1. Back-up HD3 to another external disc

2. Erase HD 3 and format it to APFS? I am noticing that most of my HD's are File System: Journaled HFS+ OS: El Capitan 10.11.6 See Screen shot of HD3 Specs below. Let me know.

3. Reload the Backed up external HD with CCC.

Thanks Tony for your help on this

Let’s do a reset here. I need to know the exact model of your Mac. The simplest way to do that is to go to  > About This Mac, click on More Info… and open System Report. Under hardware, all we need is the Model Identifier as shown in my example.

My model ID is Mac13,1. I also need to know the macOS version you are running. That’s it. I’m confused as to why you are not booting from your internal drive and instead running off of your Time Machine drive.

 

[Reesche]

Hi Tony..... Attached are several screen shots from About this Mac.....Let me know if you need any thing else. Reesche

 

[Reesche]

I am not booting up from Time Machine.... boothing HD 3 from the HD ....both HD 3 and HD 2 show up in Start Up Disc.

Reesche

 

[TonyAguila]

I am not booting up from Time Machine.... boothing HD 3 from the HD ....both HD 3 and HD 2 show up in Start Up Disc.

Reesche

It’s starting to make sense now… You have a MacPro3,1. Your “drives” are partitions of a drive—a concept that is now alien to me since I transferred my MacPro5,1 to a Mac mini back in 2018. I simply took out the four hard drives and the two SSDs, loaded them into a couple of external enclosures, and connected them to my Mac mini. It served me well—and ran Mojave from the metal graphics upgrade. (I’m just waiting for a good time to drop it off at an Apple Store for recycling.)

Anyway, if you still have at least one open drive bay, the safest course would be to get another hard drive and set it up as another macOS startup drive. This way, you can leave HD 2 and HD 3 untouched while you transfer your system to the new drive. You cannot use APFS since it is not supported in El Capitan. Once you have the new drive up and running and have migrated your data to it, we can deal with Time Machine and the other drives. If you need help in deciding and what hard drive to get, here is a good source of information.

Hard Drive Life Expectancy

How long do hard drives last? We looked to the Drive Stats data to find out.

www.backblaze.com

If you can afford to get at least 8 terabytes, it will be a good investment. The 12s are also starting to look good, as far as reliability is concerned. It will be cool to transfer it into a single HD enclosure to connect to your new M2 Mac.