Question regarding Time Machine

Hi,

I recently bought a MacBook Pro 13" when I was on holiday in the states. It is my 1st ever mac and I love it so far. Its is only the base model so it has a 160GB HD. I am not going to replace it with a bigger one anytime soon so I was going to purchase a portable extrenal HD to put all my digital media on so I didn't fill up the internal HD.

Now I really want to back up my whole laptop using Time Machine so that if I ever do replace the Hard Drive then I can just restore it straight from that. My question is.... If I bought a 500gb external hard drive and used it as the Time Machine Drive... Could I still use it to hold all my music/movies aswell? Or does it have to only contain Time Machine files?

Apologies if this is a silly question or it has been asked before but like I said it is my first experience of Mac OSX and its taking a lot of getting used to.

Thanks,

Craig

Best thing to do is to partition your 500 GB drive in 2 partitions, one dedicated for Time Machine and one to be used as normal disk storage.

Make sure the partition for Time Machine is large enough, at least the size of your internal disk.

I would not recommend mixing Time Machine backups with ' other ' files, although it is technically feasible.

Cheers ... McBie

I would make the same recommendation as McBie - partition the drive.

However, I have been using my (now old) 1 TB Time Capsule drive in a single partition for holding TM backups from multiple computers along with separate backups of music and video.

It appears to be working quite well, but I have never done a restore from the TM backups as I also use SuperDuper for my personal machine and my wife's has not yet needed a restore.

I never even thought of partitioning the drives! I think that sounds like the best way because tbh I dont want to have a number of different drives for backups and media.

Is this easy to do in OSX? or will I need an additional application to partition them?

I'm not at my Mac, but I think the Drive Utility can partition the drive for you, nothing else is needed.

You don't need an additional app. to partition and format a disk.
You can use the DiskUtility.app which can be found in the application/utilities folder.

Use that app. to partition your 500 GB disk and format each partition.
The partition for Time Machine needs to be formatted as Mac OS Extended ( Journaled ) aka. HFS+
The other partition can also be formatted in HFS+ or FAT32 ( if you want to share that disk with a windows machine ). Keep in mind that on FAT32, the size of any individual file is limited to 4 GB.

Make sure you select the correct disk in DiskUtility .... you wouldn't want to partition & format your internal disk

Cheers ... McBie

Disk Utility is all you need.

Awesome info guys, it seems like I am sorted! I will be moving files in between my Windows machine as well so thanks for mentioning the FAT32 partition.

Thanks again.

Craig

Not a reply but a follow-up question - I already have a 1TB external drive for Time Machine set up - can I now partition it, or do I have to erase what's there and start again?

You should be able to use DiskUtility. Select the current partition and use the "+" sign at the bottom of the pane to split it.

While Disk Utility should be able to resize your existing partition, you must realize, "anytime" you are playing with partitions you risk losing data.

I also wanted to add that with time machine, in preferences you can choose what files you want tm to omit, I don't used them but there are also tm managers that will give you more control over the backups also. ie I've allowed it to make an initial backup of all files and then set it to omit things like my music, applications etc. I also found that you can go back in your tm backups and remove things from all backups following the initial one.. You can find lots of info tips and tricks (if not in here -I think I posted in response to a query about it - then on the net).

I see no reason to partition the hard drive. Doing so may come back and bite you in the *** later, when you run out of space on one partition but still have lots of space left in the other... then you'll have to nuke the whole thing to resize your partitions. There is no issue with keeping one giant drive to use with both time machine and other files.

Craigyc said:

Awesome info guys, it seems like I am sorted! I will be moving files in between my Windows machine as well so thanks for mentioning the FAT32 partition.

Thanks again.

Craig

Click to expand...

The FAT32 format has a 3 or 4GB file size limit so depending on what you are saving, this may be an issue (it is for many). Not crazy about 2 partitions BTW ...
I pondered this NTFS vs FAT32 thing for a while before making my decision.

I got my 1st Mac last week and used a 500GB external hdd and formatted it in one partition while in Time Machine ... journaled extended partition. In my case, I also save files on my home network to a PC running XP that I use as a server and to attach printers to. I can easily save files to it from my Mac or PC's. This also allows me to share and to print to printers that have no OSX support.