I'm new to Apple, but love my iMac thus far. Last night I hooked up an external hard drive that I had on my pc. It formatted it and set up Time Machine. However, it appears that I can't use the drive for anything else. Is this correct? If so, how should I properly setup Time Machine and the external hard drive so I can benefit from both?
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Time Machine is hogging my external HD
- Thread starter paboynca
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You could just add whatever files you want to your Time Machine drive but yes, it would slowly occupy all the space on it. I'd just partition the drive with Disk Utility in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder so you have two partitions, one set to the maximum size of Time Machine backups you want and the other for other files.
you need to partition the drive using the Disk Utility in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder. The partition/volume must be dedicated to TM so a second partition can be used for something else. I have multiple backup disks that are partitioned for Time Machine and also a partition for Cloning my hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner - CCC makes a bootable backup disk
Be warned though:
Obviously any additional files you store on this hard drive would be lost when it fails since they would never have been backed up. You TM files would obviously still exist on your computer, but any extra files would not. In my mind, it's really not worth having files not backed up when TM makes it so easy.
My suggestion, spend an extra $50 for an other external. I own 4:
One exclusively for TM, the second for my iTunes library which also gets backed up to my TM, a third for a MiniDV tape archiving project, and a 4th that my wife and I share over the network.
I have recently seen 2TB externals for as little as $80-something at buy.com.
Obviously any additional files you store on this hard drive would be lost when it fails since they would never have been backed up. You TM files would obviously still exist on your computer, but any extra files would not. In my mind, it's really not worth having files not backed up when TM makes it so easy.
My suggestion, spend an extra $50 for an other external. I own 4:
One exclusively for TM, the second for my iTunes library which also gets backed up to my TM, a third for a MiniDV tape archiving project, and a 4th that my wife and I share over the network.
I have recently seen 2TB externals for as little as $80-something at buy.com.