Disk Utility can not resize one partition and increase size of another partition!!!

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This is really annoying. On a 2TB external drive I have two partitions. I do not want a 3rd partition called untitled. One partition(1) has .7 TB, other partition(2) has 2.3TB. I reduce the size of the .7 TB to .2 TB, and increase the size of the 2.3 TB to 2.8 TB.

If I try to resize, the Utility creates a 3rd partition, and if I delete the 3rd partition the storage returns to partition (1). I can not use a deleted partition's storage to increase storage in other partitions. How do I do this???????????

Mac OS High Sierra
 

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Erase the drive and start over. Of course, that action would delete everything in both partitions, so move them to some other drive before you do that, then copy back what you want in each partition.

There may be some third party software that will do a dynamic resizing of partitions, but I suspect that it won't be free. And that it will still require you to move data off the drive to preserve it through the process.

BTW, I think your post has an arithmetic error. You say this is a 2TB drive, and that is what the images of DU show. But you said three times that the larger partition was over 2TB. I think you meant 1.3 and you want to get to 1.8TB.

Or maybe I misunderstand what you are trying to do?
 
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Sorry about the error. I am in the process of copying the data off the drives but that is a lot of data.

I find it a really lacking the Mac Disk Utility that you can not delete, resize, and organize partitions.
 
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I find it a really lacking the Mac Disk Utility that you can not delete, resize, and organize partitions.
Apple has taken a totally different approach in APFS with the dynamic sizing of Volumes in Containers. Unfortunately, APFS can make a rotating drive perform horribly if there are a lot of changes to the files on the drives. But on SSDs it's brilliant.

Not that it makes it better, but the challenge to what you want to do is that to move partition boundaries dynamically would mean that all of the data would have to be held somewhere in suspense as the drive parameters are changed, a very difficult, if not impossible, task. What you are having to do is basically what any dynamic repartitioning would have to do, i.e., put the data in a safe place, move boundaries and then put it back. To do that dynamically the biggest single challenge is where to put it. I really don't blame Apple for dodging that particular bullet...
 
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I am having the same problem. I have 0.5Tb that I use for TM and 4.5Tb I use for everything else. The 4.5Tb partition has several volumes. Copying everything to another drive isn't really an option, especially since my understanding is TM drives can't be copied. If they can, that is a definite solution. Also, before you bring it up, assuming I could copy, I can't use a TM volume in the 4.5Tb area because it will expand to fill the available space.

I really want to increase the size of the TM partition. It turns out the stuff I have on the 4.5Tb partition uses less than half of the available space and isn't likely to ever get anywhere near 4.5Tb. OTOH, I do daily TM backups and 0.5Tb can only hold about 10 days. 1 or 1.5Tb would be better.

When I reduce the size of the 4.5Tb partition to, say, 3.5Tb, I get an untitled partition between that and the TM partition. I can't figure out how to actually expand the TM partition.

Screenshot 2025-02-02 at 10.54.53 AM.jpg
 
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If you click on the TM partition area, does a little circle appear at the end of the radius, like is is for the section highlighted in blue in your picture. If it does, can you then drag that circle counter clockwise into the "Untitled" area until it's the size you want? That is how one changes partition sizes.
 
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If you select the TM partition, can you type the size you want into the size box?
 
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The TM partition cannot be dragged or resized. I think it has something to do with being the first partition rather than the last [second], which can be resized or dragged. I wonder if I might have been able to resize it if it was the second partition rather than the first.

I really don't know the rules Apple applies to partitioning disks with Disk Utility. Can anybody point me to the docs, if they exist?

I discover there is a sale on Samsung 4Tb T7 SSDs for about $250 each compared to the Seagate 5Tb HDD I am using which costs about $125. That seems like a marvelous trade-off and once I get them I can play around with partitioning BEFORE I finalize them. I will have to keep the old drives for a while in case I need to restore anything.
 
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It is good to have spare (unused) disk drives for just this reason.
 
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I really don't know the rules Apple applies to partitioning disks with Disk Utility. Can anybody point me to the docs, if they exist?

But HS is so old that the explicit instructions for that version of DU is no longer online, AFAIK. However, what is at Apple is this:


There are 73 pages of articles about Disk Utility here: Search Results for “disk utility” – The Eclectic Light Company
 
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I looked thru the Disk Utility User Guide and I guess my big problem is how do you know which is the first and last partition? For example, to enlarge a volume you must delete the volume that comes after it but you can't enlarge the last volume. [Volume, in this case, seems to mean partition, not volume in a container.] How is that defined? There is a tiny little partition at the top. Call that the first partition? Do we go clockwise or anti-clockwise from there? My guess is clockwise but I'm not sure.

Here's where it gets tricky. I don't want to try this until I've backed up the drive, but I can split the large partition into two pieces and the new piece falls between the Time Machine partition and the occupied part of the split partition. So far so good. Now, if I want to enlarge the Time Machine partition I need to delete the partition I just added and adjust the size of the Time Machine partition to fill that space. If it is "the last" partition I won't be able to do that. If it isn't I may. However, if I delete that partition wouldn't one of the other partitions automatically fill that space? I can wait until I have more drives to play with but maybe somebody knows.
 
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I looked thru the Disk Utility User Guide and I guess my big problem is how do you know which is the first and last partition? For example, to enlarge a volume you must delete the volume that comes after it but you can't enlarge the last volume. [Volume, in this case, seems to mean partition, not volume in a container.] How is that defined? There is a tiny little partition at the top. Call that the first partition? Do we go clockwise or anti-clockwise from there? My guess is clockwise but I'm not sure.

Here's where it gets tricky. I don't want to try this until I've backed up the drive, but I can split the large partition into two pieces and the new piece falls between the Time Machine partition and the occupied part of the split partition. So far so good. Now, if I want to enlarge the Time Machine partition I need to delete the partition I just added and adjust the size of the Time Machine partition to fill that space. If it is "the last" partition I won't be able to do that. If it isn't I may. However, if I delete that partition wouldn't one of the other partitions automatically fill that space? I can wait until I have more drives to play with but maybe somebody knows.
My experience is that the round graph goes clockwise. In you image, TM is the last partition.

"Volume" is a term used in APFS. In any partition is a "Container" which holds "Volumes" that share that Container space. In that scenario, one can still partition the drive at the hardware level, which is what you are trying to do, and create multiple "drives" within that total hardware space. However, unlike Volumes, those partitions are fixed and can only be changed by direct manipulation. And that direct manipulation usually ends up in erasing the entire partition impacted as the directory area for that volume gets overwritten.

Here's where it gets tricky. I don't want to try this until I've backed up the drive, but I can split the large partition into two pieces and the new piece falls between the Time Machine partition and the occupied part of the split partition. So far so good. Now, if I want to enlarge the Time Machine partition I need to delete the partition I just added and adjust the size of the Time Machine partition to fill that space
Well, you've already accomplished the first step in that you have a drive with one large partition labelled "MBP M-1 - TM,...rack Data - TM" and one labelled "Untitled" and one labelled "TM...ne - TM." If the middle one, named "Untitled" actually exists as a partition, as it appears to do, then the drive has zero space into which the TM partition can expand. However, I don't know if you can just delete "Untitled" and then expand "TM...ne - TM" backwards into it and preserve the contents of "TM...ne - TM" at the same time. Doing that expansion that way adds more space in front of the partition, which disrupts the directory storage. That results in, if it can be done at all, an empty new partition.

Frankly, to move forward on this, I think you need to consider the actual value of the TM space at this point. How likely is it that you will actually need to go back in time to recover a file from last week, last month, last year? If you assess that to be very unlikely then the easiest path is to just start over, either with a new, smaller backup drive and repartition this older drive as a single full device. APFS is not very efficient, to say the least, on rotating drives as it creates a hugely fragmented drive that can be very slow, so it would be better to move away from APFS on that HDD.

So, if you decide that you don't need backups that far back, the best path forward, IMHO, is to get a 1 or 2TB SSD for TM, start backups on it again and leave the current HDD just as it is for now. Once you have sufficient historical backups on the new SSD to feel comfortable, erase and reformat the 5TB HDD in HFS+ (MacOS Extended, Journaled), which is much better on rotating drives. The size of the SSD needs only to be about twice what is currently in use on the source drive(s), not necessarily twice the drive capacity.

As an aside, I don't like huge drives that are then partitioned into multiple partitions and then each separately mounted. Too big a risk for me because any flaw in the partition tables and I could lose the entire drive, all partitions, all data. Too many eggs in one basket for me. It has happened to me in the past and now I avoid it with smaller drives, each a single partition and each with a dedicated use. I do have larger systems in RAID arrays and NAS storage where I keep backups and alternate copies of critical stuff. TM gets its own device.
 

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Frankly, to move forward on this, I think you need to consider the actual value of the TM space at this point. How likely is it that you will actually need to go back in time to recover a file from last week, last month, last year? If you assess that to be very unlikely then the easiest path is to just start over, either with a new, smaller backup drive and repartition this older drive as a single full device. APFS is not very efficient, to say the least, on rotating drives as it creates a hugely fragmented drive that can be very slow, so it would be better to move away from APFS on that HDD.
Thank you Jake for writing exactly what I was going to say.

As many of you will already know I erase my TM backup at each major upgrade of macOS, I have never encountered a situation where I suddenly needed something from 9 months ago that was now deleted. Partly that's because I tend to save or archive copies of things I think I might need into the future locally in folders and partly because if I haven't needed it after 6-9 months chances are I never will. On top of that I also have a CCC copy which I don't erase.

The upshot of this method is that my 1TB TM backup never gets full. Obviously that's just me, others might require a larger drive for the same effect. I also use a dedicated HDD EHD formatted as APFS for TM which copes better than a SSD with regular erasure.

So, although I've done it myself I don't advise using a partition of a EHD for TM, just as I did, you eventually run into this storage space issue, too much for one, not enough for the other. Lastly there's always the too many eggs in one basket situation where the EHD fails and you loose the lot. These days I prefer to dedicate EHD's to one purpose only.
 
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As many of you will already know I erase my TM backup at each major upgrade of macOS, I have never encountered a situation where I suddenly needed something from 9 months ago that was now deleted.
I have considered this, I have a 1TB seagate SSD, so if I am content, I don't need anything, I can just erase the SSD and start again.
 

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