3 Questions about Time Machine for Apple Mac?

[icen1ne]

Questions about Time Machine for Apple Mac?
1. When i use time machine, my computer will be backed up on the hard drive multiple times. but Will i still be able to copy files likes movies onto my hard drive since i need extra storage for my mac?

2. I have it formatted to fat32, so that i can transfer files to my windows pc. When i try to set up time machine, it asks me to reformat the HD. my question here is after reformatting, will i be able to use my hard drive to transfer files from windows to mac and vice versa???? transfering files was one of the reasons i got a external HD.

3. How fast will my hard drive fill up if its a 500gb external HD, and my mac HD is like 100gb???

 

[spinnerlys]

1. Yes. Time Machine (TM) will back up to a folder called Backups.backupd.

2. TM needs to use HFS+ (Mac OS X Extended) as its file system.
You can partition your HDD via Disk Utility with one HFS+ volume (the first one) and one FAT32 volume if you like.
I did it at some time.

3. Depends on how much and how many big files you're handling on a daily basis. For example if you get in 100 new files, with some GBs in size, on a daily basis, and delete them after you are done, they will still be in your TM backup.
I have a 250GB HDD on my iMac and it took 3 months to fill another 250GB HDD with my TM backup.

 

[Hellhammer]

1. Yes, you can store other files in there too

2. You can create a new partition with Disk Utility and format it to HFS+ if you want to keep your FAT32 partition and its files

3. 500GB will be fine for you

 

[icen1ne]

Another question about external hard drive.

Also i have been wondering if it is possible to boot windows (boot camp) from a partition on my external hard drive?