Question about Time Machine

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I looked for a general thread on time machine and could not find one.

I recently purchased an external HD to increase the free space on my hd and to back up my files. I am wondering if it is possible to have certain folders or files only on the external drive, and then to also have the rest of my files backed up with time machine.

So basically my question is can I do both of these things using time machine?
 

bobtomay

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So basically my question is can I do both of these things using time machine?

I'm guessing a more appropriate question would be, "Can you do both these things with an external drive?".

That answer would be yes, you can store your TM backups and other data on the same drive.

My question would be, what happens to the stuff you have stored on that external drive that is not on your internal drive when it dies? Are you going to be storing stuff you don't care about lising?
 
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If you go to disk utility you can format your external drive so that one part is exclusively for Time Machine and the other for random storage.
 
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My advice would be to either Partition your Time Machine drive into 2 partitions, use one partition for Time Machine and the other partition for random files you don't want kept on your computer.
Either that or buy a second external HDD for it.

- Simon
 
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My advice would be to either Partition your Time Machine drive into 2 partitions, use one partition for Time Machine and the other partition for random files you don't want kept on your computer.
Either that or buy a second external HDD for it.

- Simon

This is what I do with one difference... the 2nd partition is for a bootable clone (SuperDuper!) instead of just random files. That takes up more space, but my external drive is only 500GB and I have no space issues. Besides, external drives are so cheap that you could affordably get a 2nd drive just for a bootable clone (SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner) or purchase a large enough drive.
 

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