Repartition time machine hard disk?

Quick question for you guys.. I have a iMac with leopard on it. I have a 1TB mybook set up 100 percent dedicated for time machine.. My wife has some stuff that she wants to store off of our computer, but not on the time machine. Can I repartition the time machine so that I will have some external drive storage space without losing the info in my time machine? Thanks for any help!

John..

How big is the drive on your iMac? If it's substantially less than 1TB, then Time Machine will probably never (realistically) fill it up. You can read and write to the external drive as is without affecting Time Machine as long as there is space available on it.

I have a 500gb Time Capsule and a 160gb internal HD in my MB. After several months of use, I realized Time Machine would "never" fill it up. I read and write to it heavily on a daily basis and have never had an issue.

And when I say "never", I just mean for a really, really long time.

Jaygray,

Thanks for the response.. My internal drive is 500gigs.. The time machine will take forever I'm sure to fill.. she took some video (9 hours) for a project that we dont' want on the main computer disk.. My understanding of the time machine drive was that when you formatted it for time machine, it was unusable as a standard external disk unless you re partitioned it to include a "blank" partition.. If I'm understanding correctly, I can just drag a big file to the time machine disk, and it will show up there without affecting the time machine? Thanks much!

John..

Apple is a little vague about this, but it goes something like this...

You can do whatever you want with the blank space on the external and Time Machine doesn't care--as long as you don't let it get completely full. I don't think anyone has really experimented with what happens if you fill it up. Most likely, Time Machine would just start deleting the oldest backups as necessary to make space--no harm done, but you'd be in uncharted waters. I think you'd be safe to use it for storage as long as you periodically monitor the free space on it.