Naturally your two Time Machine backups will be out of sync once you do something on your Mac and the next backup completes—the drive you last attached will have the most up-to-date backup. Feb 21, 2020 We’ll go through a multi-step troubleshooting process to resolve the preparing backup problem and get Time Machine working on Mac OS X or macOS again. Before you take any actions, back up Mac as soon as possible. Stop the currently failing Time Machine backup attempt. Open the 'Time Machine' settings panel within System Preferences.
If you used Time Machine to create a backup of your Mac, you can restore your files from that backup or a local snapshot on your startup disk. You might want to restore your files after the originals were deleted from your Mac, or the hard disk (or SSD) in your Mac was erased or replaced, such as during a repair.
Restore from a Time Machine backup
When you restore from a Time Machine backup, you can choose to restore all your files, or restore both the Mac operating system (macOS) and all your files.
Restore all your files
Restore both macOS and your files
These steps erase your hard disk, then use your backup to restore both your files and the specific version of macOS you were using when you created the backup.
Format Drive For Mac Time Machine
Restore specific files
Learn how to use Time Machine to restore specific files, including older versions of your files.
Learn more
Format Hard Drive Mac For Time Machine
These days, you can get an external hard disk with gargantuan amounts of storage for cheap. Recently, I picked up a 2 TB G-Drive. There are many good reasons to buy a quality external hard drive, but the biggest is for backing up your Windows 10 PCs and macOS computers. Ultraportable laptops sport SSDs, which are sleek and fast, but not particularly roomy. And while we do recommend using cloud backup services like Backblaze or CrashPlan, having a local backup offers redundancy, convenience, and lower costs (depending on how much data you are hoarding).
But what do you do if you have a mix of operating system platforms in your home? One of the challenges of a heterogeneous environment consisting of macOS, Windows, and perhaps Linux machines is that each of these operating systems uses a different file system. This means that normally, they can’t share a common external hard drive. True, you could buy two 1 TB hard drives instead of one 2 TB hard drive. But it’ll be much more convenient to have one hard drive to rule them all, particularly if you plan on connecting your hard drive to your network.
There is a relatively simple solution to this, though it takes a little prep work before you start using your hard drive. In this article, I’m going to show you how to set up a hard drive so it can be used by both Windows 10 and macOS by creating separate partitions for each OS. If you happen to have Linux in the mix, you can add it in too with little effort.
VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, AVC, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg.) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.Probably the nicest thing about VLC is the fact that it includes wide variety of video and audio codecs within the program itself, meaning that for most purposes, user doesn't have to install separate code packs in order to play videos or music on PC.VLC can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. Vlc for mac.
Editor’s note: Whenever you partition or format a hard drive, it wipes the data on the disk completely clean. There are utilities that can shrink or split partitions without removing your data, but even those carry a risk of losing your data or corrupting your drive. Always back up your data before repartitioning or formatting a disk. Better yet, do the steps in this tutorial before you write anything important to the disk.
Backup Windows 10 or macOS (or Even Linux!) Using a Single External Hard Disk
So, what are we going to do exactly? The process involves splitting up a single external hard disk into multiple partitions to backup different operating systems. Windows 10 uses the NTFS (New Technology File System), while macOS uses HFS+ (Hierarchical File System). Both feature similar attributes such as journaling, permissions, encryption and a host of standard functions, but they are incompatible with each other. Apple is currently working on a next generation file system it will replace HFS+ with called APFS (Apple File System). APFS will not only support the macOS, but also future revisions of iOS, watchOS, and tvOS.
Prepping a macOS Partition Using Windows Disk ManagementFormat For Time Machine Back Up Drive Mac Os X
I have found the best way to prep an external hard disk for use on both Windows and macOS is to perform the partitioning from within Windows 10. Before you begin, you want to first determine, how much space you will allocate for each operating system. This will depend on the amount of installed storage in each machine. Because I own more Windows PCs than Mac, Windows will end up getting the lion’s share of the external hard disk. Certainly, for the Mac, you want to at least double the amount of space depending on the amount of local storage. So, if the Mac has 256 GBs of space, you should double the amount of backup space to 512 GBs. Because all the Windows PC’s use the same file system, they can share a large single partition for standard backups and system images.
At this point, you can proceed to the next section to format your Mac Backup partition. But it’s a good idea to also create a third partition on your disk that both macOS and Windows 10 can use. This makes it easy to share files between the two operating systems. Plus, this third partition will be readable and writable for Linux.
Create an exFAT Partition to Share Files Between macOS and Windows 10
To create our shared partition, we will shrink the Mac Backup partition; this time we will be using a unique file system compatible with both Windows 10 and macOS, called exFAT. We previously covered using exFAT for sharing a USB stick between Windows 10 and macOS. exFAT is similar to the FAT32 file system previously used in older operating systems like Windows 98 and XP, but exFAT can support disks with up to 16 exabytes, which is more than the 32 GB limit for FAT32.
Initialize Mac Backup Partition Using Disk Utility in macOS
So, we have completed the first steps for sharing an external hard disk between multiple operating systems. Next, we will head over to the Mac, where we will need to prepare the Mac portion of the external hard disk for use with the macOS.
And there you have it: you’ve taken your one big hard drive and made it into three separate volumes that can be used by Windows, macOS, or Linux as needed.
Partitioning your drive as described above is just the first step to a solid backup plan. Remember to check out our series of articles about backing up your data. If you need to more details about how to use the Macs built in Time Machine, be sure to check out our article. If you need advanced options for partitioning, you might want to check out our review of Easeus Partition Manager Professional.
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Are you using a mix of desktop operating system environments at home? Do you have a clever setup for your backup hard drive? Let us know in the comments!
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