If you need more external storage you will be much better off in the long run to get an additional external (prices are amazingly low for what you get) for that, and leave the backup drive just doing backups. If those files are stored on a partition on the external drive away from the TM backup, that gives you the ability to back them up with TM which sounds good on the surface but (you know there has to be a but, right? ) should the external croak, then you have lost the originals and the backups!įor those reasons, I would seriously resist the temptation to use the new backup external for anything but backups of data that exist on other physical drives. For that reason, should you have a TM drive failure those files will be gone like the wind. If they are just extra/temporary/unimportant files then no big deal, but just something to keep in mind since TM automatically excludes from backup the drive/partition its backup folder is located on. If you store miscellaneous files on either an un-partitioned drive that contains the TM backups folder or in a partition along with the TM backup, those miscellaneous files will never be backed up themselves. If you need more space, you can manually delete older backup directories as needed.įor the most part, I would agree with erikmichael's ideas but still wanted to add some more looks at it. On partition 2, Time Machine will continue to store version after version of your hard drive until it fills the drive and then it will start to remove older versions. I use any additional space on this extended drive to simply drag/drop files at will into folders I create at the site root along side of the Time Machine backup directory. It creates its own backup directory automatically (at the extended drive root) which you can easily browse after backup. Partition 2 - remaining space (about 750 GB). Using this image, you can boot your machine from any Mac using a key command at startup (I forget which combination of keys). You must have 'Journaling' enabled when you create this partition. That is the sole purpose of this partition. I use Super Duper software to schedule regular copies of my hard drive as a bootable image. Partition 1 - same size or slightly larger than my MacBook Pro internal drive (about 250 GB).

Make external hard drive time machine