I was wondering because the Mac Studio M1 has a relatively small disk drive and I do photography and music, I need to put those files on an external hard drive which will likely be "permenantly" attached to the Studio. If I use Time Machine to do periodic back ups, how do I make sure the attached Hard Drive is also backed up, or is that even possible? Thanks for any help.
Time machine backs up your COMPUTER, not your user-id. This includes every Mac-formatted drive, but does NOT include any external drives left in Windows New Technology File System (NTFS) and accessible only through the drive-maker's utilities.
Best Practice has always been to ERASE any new drive with Disk Utility. This allow the required MacOS data structures, especially the Mac File System Event Store to be maintained for the drive, and makes identifying what folders have changed and need to be backup in very fast.
Thanks Grant you must be the major knowledge base for Macs and maybe Windows too. So I always reformat my recent hard drives to APFS which I understand to be Mac specific and if I use it connected to the Mac Studio and do a backup it will be included in the back up. Is that a correct conclusion? I've never tried backing up with an attached hard drive previously as I always had larger internal disk drives so that's why I wasn't sure.
APFS and HFS+ Extended are Mac-native formats, and are always backed up automatically, unless you add them to the 'exclude' list.
That's really good news to me. Thanks Grant, and hope you continue to be such a font of wisdom. Maybe Apple will reward you.
My reward is seeing folks make sense and get better productivity out of their tools.
Backing up Mac Studio in Monterey or Ventura
