[blueartemis]

Hi,

I may have just made an incredibly dumb mistake, and hope someone here may be able to help me fix it. I recently bought an external hard drive (WD Passport for Mac, if it matters) to go with my MacBook. So I'm running Time Machine for the first time (I should have done it months ago) in order to back up everything. After starting up Time Machine, I remembered that I had wanted to also use part of the external drive for my iTunes, which isn't extensive, but is using up an ever-growing portion of my hard drive.

Was I supposed to have divided up (partitioned?) the hard drive before I ran Time Machine, in order to have one area for the iTunes stuff and one area for TM backups? Or can I create a folder in the empty space on the external hd once TM is done running, and that will be enough?

Apologies in advance for such a dumb question!

Any suggestions or comments welcome!

[fade]

I think the opinion here is that it's recommended to partition it. However, you can use it the way you describe. I keep a backup of my music on my EHD so when I'm running windows I can have my music still. It isn't partitioned either.

[Collin Bl]

Originally Posted by blueartemis

Hi,

I may have just made an incredibly dumb mistake, and hope someone here may be able to help me fix it. I recently bought an external hard drive (WD Passport for Mac, if it matters) to go with my MacBook. So I'm running Time Machine for the first time (I should have done it months ago) in order to back up everything. After starting up Time Machine, I remembered that I had wanted to also use part of the external drive for my iTunes, which isn't extensive, but is using up an ever-growing portion of my hard drive.

Was I supposed to have divided up (partitioned?) the hard drive before I ran Time Machine, in order to have one area for the iTunes stuff and one area for TM backups? Or can I create a folder in the empty space on the external hd once TM is done running, and that will be enough?

Apologies in advance for such a dumb question!

Any suggestions or comments welcome!

My advice - imagine that the HD on your Mac has mechanical failure tomorrow;
how important is it to get access to your data, and are historic changes more important than a quick reboot and continue operating.
Time Machine back ups allow you to revert to previous versions of files or do a restore in conjunction with a disk with the OS on it.

Using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner makes a mirror image of your HD - with incremental updates - so that when Ext HD is connected to another Mac you can boot off the Ext HD and continue working.