create a partition in Leopard without losing data?

[sk3pt1c]

i have an external drive that's 1TB that i use for all sorts of things but Time Machine as well...
having read that the time machine backup tends to increase over time i'd like to make a partition for it, just like others have done in topics i've read.
the question is this, can i make a sub-partition of, say 100GB using disk utility or something but not lose data from my drive?
can someone explain how to do this if it is do-able?
thanks!

 

[JNB]

Leopard supports repartitioning on-the-fly in Disk Utility. No worries!

 

[sk3pt1c]

that is cool indeed, just done it.
one question though, i had already set time machine up to back up to the external drive, so it has been doing that for about a month now.
do i just turn it off, copy the files to the new partition, set it as the drive for time machine and turn it back on?
will it be able to find the files there and continue backing up incrementally or will it delete them and back my system up from the beginning like the first time i used it?
this also applies to time capsule, cause i'm thinking of getting one, so if this works i should be able to transfer the files to it and keep backing up while maintaining my older back ups...

 

[JNB]

As long as the volume that TM is pointing to wasn't renamed, it should be fine (open TM and see that is still can locate it's backup drive as before). WRT moving to a different drive later (like TC), I "believe" you could copy everything over, but I don't have any specific examples of that working.

 

[sk3pt1c]

i tried it and got a -50 error, whatever that is, so i'm guessing moving the files over doesn't work.
well, the thing is that the drive that TM was pointing to was the big one, "1TB",
so i've taken 100gb off that and named it "TimeMachine" but i'm guessing now that this won't work, i have to keep TM connected to "1TB" in order to keep my older backups, right?
if i resize the "1tb" drive to 100gb and rename it, will that work?
and if so, will the data from it be moved to the other partition or will i lose it?
if i can just swap sizes on the partitions and then swap names, i'm ok with that...
what do you think?
(am i making sense?)

edit: looks like i have to cut the drive exactly in half, move all files except the TM ones from the first partition to the second and then resize them to keep the first partition as the TM partition...
right?

 

[JNB]

What worked for me is when I resized my external, the first volume as the TM volume (as it had been originally) and was left with the same name. The added volumes were named to something else.

I think it's more of a matter of the TM app looking at Disk x / Volume y consistently. If you created new volumes on the disk, as long as TM was looking at the same volume, you should be fine.

 

[sk3pt1c]

yeah, but i can't cut the first volume to 100gb cause it's got all my other files in it, it will only go down to 500gb, so i'd have to do that, transfer the files to the second partition and then resize them so that the first one, the one TM uses, is 100gb and the second 900gb...
yarp?

 

[JNB]

I think I get what you're saying, resize to as small as you can, "leapfrog" the files over to the new partition, then resize again until things are where you'd want 'em. That should work, but keep in mind, the first partitioning of the drive is destructive. I've actually been talking about this on another thread. iPartition allows for nondestructive partitioning.

 

[sk3pt1c]

so i'll just leave it as one big partition and monitor the size of the TM backup every now and then to make sure it's not growing to un-manage-able proportions

thanks dude!

 

[JNB]

As a side note, you can have "other" stuff on a TM backup volume, I've done this a lot. All TM is doing is writing the updates to a specified location, up to the available space. It doesn't care what else is there (files, folders, etc.). All it sees is available or occupied space. I was doing my SuperDuper! backups to the TM volume, no problems.

 

[skpsr]

Leopard supports repartitioning on-the-fly in Disk Utility. No worries!

ok so will this work in my case?

I have a 2TB external drive that I mainly used for file storage (windows partitioned)

Can I resize the drive to have a partition just for my time machine back-ups?

and NOT lose any of the existing data/files

thanks in advance, new to Mac and all it's glory

skp