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How to backup SSD drive in TimeMachine?

I have hooked up a 2TB SSD external drive to my Mac and TimeMachine (TM) kept excluding it from the backup. I want the contents of my SSD drive backed up in the regular backups.


When open Options in TM, the SSD drive is the Excluded List and it is greyed out so I cannot remove it.


Any idea how to handle this?

Posted on Jan 21, 2021 9:05 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jan 21, 2021 12:36 PM

When reformatting the drive make sure that Show All Devices has been selected from View in the menubar.

Highlight the Disk (probably named after the manufacturer) not any indented Volumes and click Erase,

do you get the APFS options now.

8 replies

Jan 21, 2021 12:16 PM in response to Old Toad

Interesting, when I tried to Erase it, APFS is not one of the options.

The ones available are only the MacOS Extended (Case sensitive, journaled) and the non-case sensitive ones.

None of the APFS are available.


Additionally, Partition was greyed out. So, I can't even re-partition it.


Strange. Is APFS only suitable for disk-based drives?


I have formatted it to MacOS Extended (Case sensitive, journaled).


How to backup SSD drive in TimeMachine?

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