Time Machine not regognising external HDD

[trevor WATERS]

Hi, I am very much the novice at tech so any help would be most grateful. After changing computer from 2012 imac to mac mini 2 pro I find time machine which I have used for many years will not recognise one of my external HDD. The HDD appears to work fine yet it is greyed out in time machine. I ran the drive though first aid and all appears to be okay. I am at a loss of where to go from here. I have thousands of photos on the drive and some now have gone missing in LR. Any help or ideas would be very appreciated so I can do a restore. Thanks.

[kglad]

don't use time machine until adobe apps have been uninstalled.

otherwise, ask in mac forums about problems with time machine.

[kglad]

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post (like this one has already been moved) if it helps you get responses.

<"moved from using the community">

[Nancy OShea]

Hi @trevor WATERS,

This is not a MAC technical forum. That being said, your external hard drive is probably not formatted correctly for your Mac to read its contents.  This is a common problem for NTFS formatted drives.  APFS is the standard for most macOS.

See troubleshooting guide below for more details.

https://setapp.com/how-to/how-to-access-external-drive-thats-not-recognized-on-mac

Hope that helps.

[Moderator moved from the non-technical Lounge to Lightroom.]

[Conrad_C]

Do you mean you want Time Machine on the new Mac to read a Time Machine backup from the old Mac? If so, here are some ideas.

If you are trying to use the new Mac to get files from the old Mac’s backups, it might not be necessary to go through Time Machine. You might be able to simply find them by looking through the old Time Machine backup drve through the Finder.

I am not sure if this is necessary for getting files from it, but if you wanted the new Mac to keep using the old Mac’s Time Machine backup drive for new backups, you may need to have the new Mac “inherit” the backup, as described in these two links.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/if-your-new-mac-inherits-your-backup-history-mh35732/mac

https://www.macworld.com/article/231077/how-to-make-sure-time-machine-works-when-you-upgrade-your-ha...

Beyond this, if you still have trouble, you might get a better answer more directly from Apple support or the Apple Discussions forum, because this is definitely more of a macOS question than an Adobe question.