Hello fellow Mac enthusiasts!
A few months ago the 160GB HD on my 4 yr old Blackbook died as a result of a small drop and I lost everything on the drive. It sucked pretty bad. I was such a fool to not utilize Time Machine (despite bragging about the feature for years while boasting Apple products). I have vowed not to let this occur again. It took countless hours but I reimported all music + artwork and old files back on my computer after going through about 300 discs from the past 15 years. Very tedious work but my mac is now finally ready for the initial back up. I am rolling the dice not having already done the backup.
My question fairly simple, I now have a 500GB HD in my macbook and I was thinking about getting a Western Digital My Book 2TB USB 3.0 external hard drive for 90 bucks at Walmart. What I am thinking about doing is having disk Utility partition the external HD so 1TB is allocated for Time Machine and the other 1TB to be used as a file drop box. For example if I take it to my bros place and want to do a file transfer from his Windows based computer onto the external drive or just using it to drop miscellaneous files to that I dont want to use Time Machine for.
Would I be able to use the external in the fashion I am envisioning? If so, what file format would the 1TB 'file drop' partition need to be so both mac and windows could read/write on it?
When I think about it I dont see any reason it wouldn't work but I thought I'd run the idea past a few experts. I really appreciate the help guys this message board is the best source for information from Mac enthusiasts!
A few months ago the 160GB HD on my 4 yr old Blackbook died as a result of a small drop and I lost everything on the drive. It sucked pretty bad. I was such a fool to not utilize Time Machine (despite bragging about the feature for years while boasting Apple products). I have vowed not to let this occur again. It took countless hours but I reimported all music + artwork and old files back on my computer after going through about 300 discs from the past 15 years. Very tedious work but my mac is now finally ready for the initial back up. I am rolling the dice not having already done the backup.
My question fairly simple, I now have a 500GB HD in my macbook and I was thinking about getting a Western Digital My Book 2TB USB 3.0 external hard drive for 90 bucks at Walmart. What I am thinking about doing is having disk Utility partition the external HD so 1TB is allocated for Time Machine and the other 1TB to be used as a file drop box. For example if I take it to my bros place and want to do a file transfer from his Windows based computer onto the external drive or just using it to drop miscellaneous files to that I dont want to use Time Machine for.
Would I be able to use the external in the fashion I am envisioning? If so, what file format would the 1TB 'file drop' partition need to be so both mac and windows could read/write on it?
When I think about it I dont see any reason it wouldn't work but I thought I'd run the idea past a few experts. I really appreciate the help guys this message board is the best source for information from Mac enthusiasts!
