external Hard drive??

Hi All,

I'm looking at purchasing the following external hard drive to back-up both my wifes and my MBP w/750gb, will I be able to do both with this hard drive? I figured I would have to partition the drive for each, if it will work how hard is it to partition these hard drives I have never done one before.

Western Digital - My Book Essential 2TB External USB 3.0/2.0 Hard Drive

Yes you can do that. Partioning is easy, just plug in the drive and run Disk Utility which should be in the Utilities Folder in you Applications Folder.

Select the drive in the lefthand pane, and then select Partition. Size the partitions as you want and format as MacOS Extended(Journaled).

You then tell Time Machine on each Mac which partition to use for the backup.

MightyGem said:

Yes you can do that. Partioning is easy, just plug in the drive and run Disk Utility which should be in the Utilities Folder in you Applications Folder.

Select the drive in the lefthand pane, and then select Partition. Size the partitions as you want and format as MacOS Extended(Journaled).

You then tell Time Machine on each Mac which partition to use for the backup.

Click to expand...

Ok Thanks very much

LIke you I just set up a time machine back up system for two mac computers. I am using Time Capsule. I have a related question. Is there a reason to partition as opposed to just setting up both computers to back up to the drive on the same partition using time machine which is the way I am doing it now?

Not really a huge reason to change what you are doing. You could run into a situation at some point where the two backups are competing for space but Time Machine should merely delete the oldest files from the backup that is running short on space.

If you wanted to control how large each backup gets you cannot really "partition" the Time Capsule drive in the true sense of the word. Your options for that would be either

1.Setting up separate "shares" on the Time Capsule and assigning each backup to a different share. I think the software supports creating those IIRC.
2. Attach a hard drive to the TC and partition that drive as needed for the different backups.