I have a new SSD external drive for backup. My MacBook Air (2020, Sequoia 15.6) insists that ‘Owners’ are ‘disabled’. What should I do?
My post *does* include (nothing but) text!
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 15.6
Anthony Jackson3 wrote:
Oh, I see that in 'Time Machine Settings …’ I have a line ‘Exclude from Backups’, and beneath it ‘DSD’. Beneath that ‘+’ and (greyed out) ‘-). At the bottom of the box an apparently live button entitled ‘Done’.
How should I respond to that ?
All you need to do is follow the two instructions that den/thed posted:
1) Erase the external drive, format it as APFS and GUID
2) Open Time Machine Settings and designate that newly erased drive as your target drive for Time Machine backups.
That's it.
When designated for Time Machine, the drive will appear as read only to you and ownerships and permissions are overwritten by the system as it takes over the drive for backups. It is basically dedicated to backups.
"Exclude from Backups" should be left alone if all you have is your Mac to be backed up and this drive as the target location for the backups. It will list external drives (including the backup target drive itself) to be "excluded" because you don't want to back up that external drive to itself. Other external drives are excluded by default, but you can change that if you want other external drives to be backed up in addition to your Mac. By "exclude" Apple means "don't back up this device." You can also exclude individual files and folders on your Mac but to get you started, just leave that Setting at its default.
Anthony Jackson3 wrote:
Oh, I see that in 'Time Machine Settings …’ I have a line ‘Exclude from Backups’, and beneath it ‘DSD’. Beneath that ‘+’ and (greyed out) ‘-). At the bottom of the box an apparently live button entitled ‘Done’.
How should I respond to that ?
All you need to do is follow the two instructions that den/thed posted:
1) Erase the external drive, format it as APFS and GUID
2) Open Time Machine Settings and designate that newly erased drive as your target drive for Time Machine backups.
That's it.
When designated for Time Machine, the drive will appear as read only to you and ownerships and permissions are overwritten by the system as it takes over the drive for backups. It is basically dedicated to backups.
"Exclude from Backups" should be left alone if all you have is your Mac to be backed up and this drive as the target location for the backups. It will list external drives (including the backup target drive itself) to be "excluded" because you don't want to back up that external drive to itself. Other external drives are excluded by default, but you can change that if you want other external drives to be backed up in addition to your Mac. By "exclude" Apple means "don't back up this device." You can also exclude individual files and folders on your Mac but to get you started, just leave that Setting at its default.
To properly erase and format the SSD for your Mac..
see > Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
To setup Time Machine backups using the SSD..
I might have added that it was ‘Disk Utility’ which insisted that ‘Owners’ are ‘disabled’.
I was allowed to ‘Erase’ the drive, which took longer than I expected, given that it claimed to contain 0 bytes. It now contains, according to Disk Utility, 14 MB – I guess ‘Erase’ nowadays means ‘Format’?
Whatever, I’m still not allowed to use it to back up my MacBook Air, using Time Machine ...
Help?
Oh, I see that in 'Time Machine Settings …’ I have a line ‘Exclude from Backups’, and beneath it ‘DSD’. Beneath that ‘+’ and (greyed out) ‘-). At the bottom of the box an apparently live button entitled ‘Done’.
How should I respond to that ?
MacBook Air (2020, Sequoia 15.6) disables 'Owners' for external SSD backup
