LR Time Machine and External Hard Drives

I have a similar setup. I never use time machine because you have to rebuild a whole drive to retrieve anything, a total pain. A better option is a program called Carbon Copy Cloner. It will back up both OS drive that you are able to reboot from and your external drive. It lets you access any file individual on backup with having to restore. I also keep my Catalog backup on the external drive to save space on OS drive. Does this make sense? Once you ever have to use a time machine backup to restore you will see what i mean. Why should you spend so much time backing up and you cannot access files directly?

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Carbon Copy Cloner

Mattieo777  wrote I've watched many YouTube videos and I'm not getting the answer I need, at least I don't know if I've gotten the answer. I have more photos/content than my iMac can store. I have LR Classic on the internal drive and the photos on an external Hard drive. Here's what I want to do but not sure. I want to be able to use Time Machine to backup the LR catalog (on the internal hard drive) and the edited/newly imported photos (on the external drive 1) to external hard drive 2 for backup, is this possible?

Yes, that is possible. You can backup external disks in Time Machine as well. External disks are usually excluded, so you simply have to remove it from the exclusions list. It does mean that your backup disk must have enough capacity to hold the contents of both disks, because you can not spread out a Time Machine backup over multiple disks.

You need a strategy for backing up your images as well. The images are not in the catalog. It would probably be a good idea for you to have a second external hard drive dedicated to storing the backups of your catalog as well as backups of your images. But that's a strategy for you to determine.

Yes, it is possible.

Better solution is to use the built in Lightroom catalog backup feature (be sure to check the box that says "Test Intergrity Before Backing Up") to make catalog backups on your external drive, so that if the internal drive fails, then you still have a backup on the external drive.