thanks for your reply cman548!
yea, i feel this could be a long tedious task! haha!
i have managed to find a couple of threads regarding this and was wondering if anyone can confirm/deny this process:
Have my external drive plugged in and get Mac os to “share” the drive
then using the inbuilt mbl dashboard, create a safepoint, which would then hopefully look for the shared external drive?
would this be a real backup i.e. time-machine like, or just a snapshot of where the drive is etc?
Thanks!