WD My Passport For Mac is $67 more expensive than an average external hard drive ($95.99). The Seagate Backup Plus For Mac ranges from 1TB to 4GB and like the WD My Passport, it’s ready formatted for use on Macs and Time Machine ready for instant backups as soon as you plug it into your Mac. My Passport for Mac portable storage works straight out of the box with Mac devices which makes it easy to get going quickly - drag and drop files to and from, or setup a backup routine with Apple's Time Machine software to help protect your photos, videos, music and documents.
This answer explain starting macOS Time Machine backups to My Passport and External USB Drives.*END
Time Machine can be used with most external USB hard drives as well as many Network devices. For external drives, the device must be formatted as HFS+ in order to be used with Time Machine. Time Machine backups to external USB drive can be encrypted, adding a layer of data protection and privacy. For more information, please refer to Answer ID 26160: How to Encrypt a Time Machine Backup
WD Network drives such as My Cloud can also be used with Time Machine. Please refer to Answer ID 2374: Starting macOS Time Machine Backups to My Cloud and Network Attached Storage for assistance in configuring a WD Network Drive with Time Machine
Click on the links below to go to backup or restore section of the article
How to backup and How to restoreTime Machine is supported on macOS versions listed below
- macOS 10.14 (Mojave)
- macOS 10.13 (High Sierra)
- macOS 10.12 (Sierra)
- macOS 10.11 (El Capitan)
- macOS 10.10 (Yosemite)
- macOS 10.9 (Mavericks)
- macOS 10.8 (Mountain Lion)
- macOS 10.7 (Lion)
- macOS 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
- macOS 10.5 (Leopard)
How to Backup
To perform a Time Machine backup on macOS, connect the drive to your Mac and make sure it is formatted for Time Machine backups
Critical:The instructions in the article below are designed to help repartition and format a hard drive. This process is Data Destructive and cannot be undone. Once the process begins, ALL THE DATA ON THE DRIVE WILL BE LOST! |
For additional information, please refer to Apple article HT202784: Formatting a backup disk for use with Time Machine and Answer ID 8200: How to Partition and Format a WD Drive on Windows and macOS
Important: Steps and screenshots may vary based on the version of macOS being used
How to restoreFor additional information regarding macOS Recovery and Migration Assistant, please refer to Apple article HT201250: Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac and Apple article HT204350: How to move your content to a new Mac
Please click to view the Use of Third-Party Software or Websites disclaimer Published 08/20/2018 02:41 AM | Updated 04/25/2019 02:42 PM Please rate the helpfulness of this answerRelated Answers |
Posted by4 years ago
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A friend came to me today looking to wipe his computer clean and reinstall everything from a backup. Being that he uses a Mac, I suggested to him to use Time Machine. He already backed up his computer to an external hard drive, specifically a 2 TB WD My Passport for my Mac. I helped him connect that external hard drive to Time Machine.
I proceeded to restart the computer while holding cmd + R, as that is the way to reinstall. I selected reinstall from a time machine back up, and pressed continue, but no back up could be recognized. It kept on searching. I checked to see if my external hard drive would be recognized on his computer and it did. However, when I checked if his ext. hard drive would work on my computer, nothing showed up. Obviously it is a problem with the external hard drive. Any ideas on how to make the Mac recognize it when reinstalling or a work around to reinstall his backup?
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