Time Machine...dedicated drive?

Sorry if duplicating a post, but I can't find. Apple Care phone support unable to answer this question and see nothing at support site.

Want to use time machine. Have external firewire drive. However, I already have stuff on that drive that I don't want to lose. Not clear from instructions found anywhere how time machine will treat this drive or the existing contents. Will existing data remain as-is or does time machine take over the entire drive and wipe it?

Hi,

I have an external firewire hard drive and I used carbon copy to duplicate my Tiger OS drive contents before upgrading to Leopard. Then installed Leopard and everything was OK and I used the drive for my Time Machine drive. Then to test it I unhooked it and restored eveything onto another Imac I have (but will soon sell).....

Everything worked perfectly and now I can still see all my stuff on the external drive.

So.....in short you can use it for Time Machine and all you other stuff remains safe and untouched.

Time Machine seems to store everything in a folder called backups.backupdb. so other stuff is untouched.

Hope this helps.

Thanks sidturbo...that's what I was hoping to learn. The info I have on there is like yours -- CCC done before Leopard upgrade. I've gone ahead and begun my first time machine back-up and I can see from my iStat window that the existing info is apparently intact -- at least the indication is that those previous gb's are still there. Time machine appears to be adding its own data but not messing with what's already there. Will report in due course. Hopefully my experience will be like yours. Here we go.

Strange that the Apple techs don't know how this works yet. Seemed like a pretty basic question to me.

Hi Asolo.

....I thought that too. As you say,... really basic stuff. Maybe you got a stupid tech person. Sounds unbelievable that they don't know such important information.

I am certain your data will be safe.

Mine is.

Apple surely would not be so stupid to wipe an entire drive to store backups.

Fingers crossed. Please let me know if everything is OK.

Feel responsible now..... can't stand the tension!

Yo, sidturbo....yoo da maaan!

Time Machine worked/works perfectly and previous CCC folders remain intact. Time Machine made a new folder for itself on the external drive called "backups.backupdb" and left everything else alone. Easy as can be.

Much more comfortable now that I know how it does what it does.

Thanks again.

Even I had the same doubt earlier until I went through with it. I wonder why apple doesn't explicitely mention that nothing's going to happen to existing data. Btw, I think one can use the same external drive for backing up two macs...

Interesting, I had always read that TM needed the entire partition that you give it. The single backup file is a MUCH better way of doing it!

It's actually a backup folder with folders within it. One problem I find with Time Machine is that your backups are totally insecure. That is, you might have a password to your Mac, but someone could very well take your backup drive and copy stuff off it. I would have preferred if Time Machine had the option of making an encrypted backup in the form of a .Sparsefile like File Vault.

Glad it all turned out ok Asolo.

Never been referred to as " Da Maaan " before.

Feel honoured.