External Hard Drive and Time Machine Question

[psychotropic]

I am new to mac and want to use time machine on my new macbook pro. I have an external hard drive that currently contains information from my old dell. I was wondering if I needed to delete everything off of it before I set up time machine or if I can leave that information on there and use time machine on it also? Thanks for you help.

 

[fluidedge]

no you can leave it all on there, time machine will just work away eating the rest of the HDD.

 

[psychotropic]

Thanks!

Thank you for the quick reply. I will go home and do it tonight. Is there a certain amount of time that I need to set aside for it to set up and create its little back up thingy? I'm a student and need my laptop for homework, so I just want to know how much time I will need to devote. Thanks again.

 

[fluidedge]

hmmm it depends, it can take a while how big is your HDD? Best idea is just to leave it over night imo

 

[blodwyn]

I am new to mac and want to use time machine on my new macbook pro. I have an external hard drive that currently contains information from my old dell. I was wondering if I needed to delete everything off of it before I set up time machine or if I can leave that information on there and use time machine on it also? Thanks for you help.

It's going to depend on how your external drive is formatted. If it's NTFS you're going to have to reformat it, which involves getting your data off first. I'm not sure if Time Machine works OK with FAT32 or not. FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit, which may screw up Time Machine's ability to back up files.

The best bet is to get the data off, reformat it to Mac format, and then put your data back. Time Machine will then be happy with the drive.

 

[fluidedge]

thats a good point. I did actually wonder whether it would need refomatting but i wasn't sure

 

[group09]

Yeah, sadly Time Machine won't work unless it's a mac-formatted (HFS+/Journaled Extended) disk or partition. Too bad.