Formatting my new external hard drive?

Can anyone suggest the best steps to make sure my external hard drive is properly formatted to back up my iMac on TimeMachine?
Thanks

Check these directions for an overview of Time Machine setup. Format a drive using Disk Utility in El Capitan. Choose MacOS Extended Journaled as the format type.

Actually @MacLover2011.... when you attach an external drive to your Mac, and if it's unformatted or formatted to NTFS, and you access Time Machine, Time Machine will offer to format the drive for you - using the correct format. ;D

chscag said:

Actually @MacLover2011.... when you attach an external drive to your Mac, and if it's unformatted or formatted to NTFS, and you access Time Machine, Time Machine will offer to format the drive for you - using the correct format. ;D

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Thanks. And what is the correct format?

Should I prevent my iMac from going to sleep when doing the first back up? It's well over 2 gbs.

Thanks. And what is the correct format?

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As Admin chscag said, it does it for you, but the answer is: OS X Extended (Journaled) as Sly mentioned in post #2.

Should I prevent my iMac from going to sleep when doing the first back up? It's well over 2 gbs

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Yes, I would to be on the safe side.

By the way, I'm guessing there may have been a slight typo or understatement, in that your Time Machine Backup includes settings, mail, photos, in fact everything; so it's truly going to be more than 2GB!. The OS alone is 5GB or more!

Ian

I tried to delete and format the drive a few times. Each time there was an error. There might be a mounting or unmounting problem?

MacLover2011 said:

I tried to delete and format the drive a few times. Each time there was an error. There might be a mounting or unmounting problem?

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You don't need to delete before formatting.

Thanks for your help everyone. I formatted the hard drive and time machine did it's back up.

Thanks for posting back. Congratulations.

Ian

What happens when you have to force quit the iMac when Timmachine is in the middle of a backup? I just had to do this because my computer monitor went black! I am trying a new backup now after I restarted the Mac but it's in preparing for back up mode. It's taking a long time.

*** It eventually did do a back up. But what should I do next time it gets stuck in prepare mode?