Carbon Copy Cloner help

Okay after searching the forums I come to you for help. I am trying out CCC on a trial basis. And I have searched the help section. So what I need to know is, I cloned my hard drive to my external which already had my TM backups on it. Should I have created a partition first? Or should I wipe my external drive clean and start over? This all new to me. Thanks for any help.

Yes, you should have partitioned the external drive. Carbon Copy Cloner will overwrite anything that's on the drive. I keep two external hard drives for that very purpose: One for CCC and the other for Time Machine. It doesn't make sense to use one hard drive for both if you wish to have redundancy with your backups. Lose the hard drive and you've lost both your backups. Keep them separate on two hard drives.

Of course, that makes sense. I have another external. I will erase and re-format. Thank you.