I want to store all my media on an external Firewire Hard Drive connected to my iMAC. The question is - can I use time-machine to backup that external hard drive to another drive? If so, how do I set up the preferences? I am new to MAC and so am a novice.
Thanks
First off, I assume that you already have hooked your time-machine backup destination to the Mac, and that you have configured the time machine to use this disk. If you did not, and need more help, let me know.
Anyway, if Time Machine is already doing hourly backups, all you will have to do, is tell Time Machine to include the Firewire drive. Hold down the option key and click on the Time Machine icon to launch the preferences. (Alternatively, go to system preferences, then select Time Machine.)
In the top-right section of the preferences window, some information is given regarding the status of your time machine backups, etcetera. Near it should be a button labeled Options...
Click this button to open a window. In this window, locations are defined that should not be backed up. Your external disks should be on this list. So all you should have to do to enable backups for your firewire disk, is remove that disk from the list. (Select the Firewire drive in the list, and click the - (minus) button. Click done to close the window, and the next time Time Machine Runs, your drive should be included.
EDIT: trying this out on the Mac of my brother shows me that apparently you cannot just select those disks. I'll see if I happen to have installed a plugin of some sort that enabled this to work.
EDIT 2: SOLUTION FOUND: Apparently the steps above SHOULD work, as long as your external drive is formatted in Mac OS formatting. My brother was using a FAT formatted drive, which cannot be backed up by time machine. So note that your firewire drive needs to be in Mac OS formatting.
