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reden

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 30, 2006
725
845
  • Time Machine issues, cannot see my data that I had backed up all the way to December 2018
  • I run a Plex server and all my meta data got screwed up for all the media, have thousands of movies and all posters are gone, it's such a painful process to manually address some of the wrongly-matched metadata. Never had an issue porting my database year after year until now
  • I have two large external USB-C hard drives, and even after doing Cmd-Option-P-R they still don't shut down after shutting down the computer. Once I restart or startup again, they never show up, have to manually disconnect the drives every time now

Any ideas how to fix any of these issues?
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Huntn

macrumors Penryn
May 5, 2008
24,002
27,085
The Misty Mountains
  • Time Machine issues, cannot see my data that I had backed up all the way to December 2018
  • I run a Plex server and all my meta data got screwed up for all the media, have thousands of movies and all posters are gone, it's such a painful process to manually address some of the wrongly-matched metadata. Never had an issue porting my database year after year until now
  • I have two large external USB-C hard drives, and even after doing Cmd-Option-P-R they still don't shut down after shutting down the computer. Once I restart or startup again, they never show up, have to manually disconnect the drives every time now

Any ideas how to fix any of these issues?
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This may not help you at this point and I'm not familiar with how a Plex server works, nor am I by any means a tech expert on the best way to preserve data, but since I have a MBP with a small hard drive 500GB, I keep all of my important data on parallel external drives using a synch program to keep them mirrored, and in addition, I'm currently using iDrive to back those up to the Cloud (single copy there). I'd never want them all to be dependent on Time Machine, and I just use that to back up my Macintosh HD.
Even so I have a **** load of apps on my MBP, that would be a real pain if I had to reconstruct them, settings, permissions etc, and I've used Time Machine to update new computers with all of those apps, so Time Machine is important to me.
 

crjackson2134

macrumors 601
Mar 6, 2013
4,847
1,957
Charlotte, NC
It’s a hard lesson I learned decades ago. Don’t rely on one backup, or even one form of backup. My data has 7 different backups all on different types of media. Both online (connected) and offline (not connected). All this and I once had a catastrophic loss and only 2 backups survived. The reason they survived is because of different backup types, storage types. I dumped TM, and now use multiple strategies. Best thing I ever did...

Like the OP, I have thousands of media files, and thousands of documents that go back 50 years (scanned into digital storage), thousands of photographs, family and occupational. None of this is on TM. TM burned me twice before I changed my methods.
 
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fisherking

macrumors G4
Jul 16, 2010
11,252
5,563
ny somewhere
my plex data is fine (i just checked); it's all on an external usb 3 drive. what do you mean, about the usb-c drives? they have power switches? if you shut down your mac, they're still running?? perhaps try resetting the SMC...
 

reden

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 30, 2006
725
845
my plex data is fine (i just checked); it's all on an external usb 3 drive. what do you mean, about the usb-c drives? they have power switches? if you shut down your mac, they're still running?? perhaps try resetting the SMC...

Normally they can see the Mac is shutting down so they shut down as well, it's been like this since I bought them, no more after Catalina.
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It’s a hard lesson I learned decades ago. Don’t rely on one backup, or even one form of backup. My data has 7 different backups all on different types of media. Both online (connected) and offline (not connected). All this and I once had a catastrophic loss and only 2 backups survived. The reason they survived is because of different backup types, storage types. I dumped TM, and now use multiple strategies. Best thing I ever did...

Like the OP, I have thousands of media files, and thousands of documents that go back 50 years (scanned into digital storage), thousands of photographs, family and occupational. None of this is on TM. TM burned me twice before I changed my methods.

A hard lesson I learned as well many years ago. I do have Terabytes of data, and I have backups upon backups, just trying to see if these few issues are fixable for my primary backup source before I just got back to Mojave. My main backup sits in the cloud, so that's very secure.
 
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