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external hard drive questions

H

homeshire

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 24, 2002
214
0
Ohio, looking toward Germany
I have a seagate external I've been using with my g5 iMac as a time machine backup. kids got guitar hero and spore for xmas, and it is playable only on my wife's intel macbook, which simply lacks the hard drive space for them. what I would like to do is take my external and hook it up to the macbook and install those games on the external without wiping, reformatting or otherwise repartitioning that external. Is this possible? am I being silly? is it ok to just hook it up, install and go with it while leaving my time machine backup untouched? or is something going to have to be sacrificed to make it happen?

thanks for the help all
 
It will work fine with your games, your Time Machine will back up until the drive space you have is full and then start over writing the oldest stuff. It won't overwrite the games you have on the hard drive.

It would be much better overall to make a partition and it's a painless process so you should really consider it.
 
Yes you use the Disk Utility to do a partion. You should not have to erase your Time Machine backup, however if your computer is running smoothly right now it wouldn't hurt anything if you lost your current backup and start fresh.
If TM is your only backup for your computer I can understand your apprehension but you should be keeping a copy of your goodies (documents, photos, music and whatever else) backed up elsewhere so the loss of your time machine drive would be meaningless. If you don't, this could be a good time to buy a cheap Firewire or USB drive to back everything up then keep that drive in another location (work, friend's house, safe deposit). You never know when a fire, thief, flood or other disaster could strike. I keep my back up drive at work and every month or two I bring it home for a backup then it goes back to my office.
 
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