Preparing an EHD for Time Machine backup

[RideForever]

I currently have a 8TB Western Digital MY BOOK EHD for TM backup + a backup of my separate 3TB PHOTOS WD EHD (named PRIME BU).


I want to have another 8TB WD backup stored elsewhere. I started by connecting the new one to my iMac and tried to rename it SECONDARY BACKUP. This seemed to take and I then selected TM to run a backup. It would not do so, indicating no space (???) and it now shows that all the capacity has been used and the renaming did not take.


For some reason also, I see another Disk image and do not know where that comes from.


Any assistance would be appreciated.

David

 

[chas_m]

I may need to do a bit more research on this, as things may have changed, but Time Machine is designed to back up only your boot drive, and only to an external drive. You’ll need some other program to back up external drives to other external drives, or from external to internal. I suggest Chronosync for people who have more than one additional drive they want to sync, or Carbon Copy Cloner for just creating bootable clones.

 

[RideForever]

Hi Charles, sorry I was not clear enough. I am using TM only to back up the iMac and then manually copy what is on the other external. That way I would have two backups, one which would be stored offsite.

My problem was not in doing that but seems to be in preparing the external to work with an iMac.

 

[chas_m]

Hi Charles, sorry I was not clear enough. I am using TM only to back up the iMac and then manually copy what is on the other external. That way I would have two backups, one which would be stored offsite.

My problem was not in doing that but seems to be in preparing the external to work with an iMac.

Ah. As we discussed at the general meeting tonight, possibly the disk is damaged or hosed due to improper dismounting (this is not necessarily your fault, but do always dismount external drives through the eject icon or dragging to trash first and make sure all activity has ceased before unplugging them). If that's the case, a reformat using other tools or another computer may be necessary. If the directory of the drive is so badly damaged that it can't easily be reformatted, a separate tool like DiskWarrior may be necessary (I have a copy of this I can use if you want to loan me the drive) in order to repair the directory enough for reformatting, or it may be necessary to write off the drive and get another one.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, you may want to consider getting Chronosync to "design" a routine or automatic backup of selected contents for your second external; Carbon Copy Cloner can do this as well, and both cost about the same IIRC. Of course if you wish to continue doing the second backup manually, you can do that as well once you resolve the formatting issue.

 

[RideForever]

Re the Disk image shown in the earlier post, I used Eject but could find nothing in Applications to delete as suggested. Also, as suggested, I connected the recalcitrant EHD to a laptop but it could not be read at all given it is a Windows OS and which suggests that the EHD is either corrupted or formatted for the iMac.

Connecting back to the iMac, the following immediately comes up:

for which I chose Initialize which leads to:


I then chose the RESTORE option

and see that Restore would come from APPLE HDD ST1000DM003 Media which is the SAME name as the iMac Internal drive. Is this significant and should be used.

Next, I looked at ERASE

and this also looks like it could be promising - give it the SECONDARY BU name I want, use what appears to be the standard partition (heh, what do I know) and it would be formatted properly.

Charles, what do you think? Do I go straight to your DiskWarrior offer instead?

 

[chas_m]

I wouldn’t go the restore route, I’d try erasing it again and formatting it as needed for your backup.

 

[RideForever]

Yessssssss !!!!!!!
Thank you Charles
Have a preliminary second back up for safekeeping; now to look at Carbon Copy Cloner or Chronosync to take the drudgery out.