OS X 10.11 “El Capitan” came out at the end of last month but I held off downloading and installing it because I wanted to get an external hard drive to use with TimeMachine. Monday was my shopping day and the Seagate 2T Backup Plus Slim at Staples looked good. They put the shelf display box in my bag at the checkout but that was quickly fixed by the manager who had someone retrieve the actual hard drive from their stockroom.
I attached it and it went right to a dialog asking if I wanted to use TimeMachine and it backed up my hard drive in a bit less than half an hour.
I then did the System Upgrade: 6 GB, 5 hour download and 30 minute install. It also went well until I made the mistake of logging in to iCloud. Well, it was after midnight by then.
Today I am backing up a 500 GB external hard drive connected to the MacBook Air USB port. TimeMachine doesn’t do that by default but it turned out to be configurable. First open the TimeMachine System Preferences:
Next click the options button in the lower right hand corner. This lets you choose which mounted volumes to exclude:
Simply click the external drive you want to back up, then click the minus sign to remove it from the excluded list.
Turns out I am pushing the software to the limit. One of the files on the external drive is a 5.9 GB disk image. It is taking a while…
