Does my external need to always be plugged in for journaling to work?

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So, I have my mac book backed up on an external HD. My external is partitioned into three blocks, with two of them being for back in journaled format.

My question is:
Does my external HD need to be plugged in ALL THE TIME for journaling to work? I don't want to carry around my clunky western digital external all the time and only use it for back up purposes.

Will it somehow catch up with journaling if i just plug it in once a day or so? Or will it just journal when I have it plugged in and confuse things by only having bits and pieces of the actions I've done since the last back up?
 
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By journaling are you referring to Time Machine backups? If so, then no, you don't need to have it plugged in all the time. As long as you plug it in a couple times a week then you should be fine.
 
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I only plug mine in once a week and it seems to work just fine. I just turn if off (not sure that is necessary).
 
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I use carbon copy cloner to back up the drive, but I partitioned and formatted the external with disk utility.

I guess my confusion comes from my understanding that journaled drives log everything you've done since the last back up, allowing them to understand how you got from the drive at the time of back up to the time of a re-boot (in the event of a crash).

If i'm re-saving files, moving files, and deleting files on my computer without my external backup plugged in, I'm not sure how the journaled back-up knows how i've gotten from point A to point B.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the way journaled drives work?
 
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Journaling File System

Yes, it logs everything, but it's not quite the way you're understanding it. Your external hard drive doesn't have anything to do with how your internal drive is journaled.
 

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