Time Machine on a Partition?

[ghking]

Hello
I am getting my external USB drive ready for time machine. This might be a dumb question but can time machine use only a partition on the external the same size as my internal drive? And how do i partition it? And will the files already on the external drive be deleted when i partition it?
Thanks

 

[72930]

Yes you can. You can partition in Disk Utility on your Mac...

 

[Nugget]

When you choose a volume to store your Time Machine backup it does not have to be the same size as the primary volume. The Time Machine backup data can co-exist with other data on the drive, as well.

The Time Machine data does not require a dedicated partition, and it's all self-contained inside a folder at the root level of the volume you've selected.

 

[ghking]

Oh good. thanks guys.