Just bought a 320 gig western digital hd. I have a 250gb mbp. I do a little gaming on the Windows side of my computer as well. I want to be able to set up time machine with the HD (250/320 gigs of the HD), and be able to put any games I have on the remaining space. Is this possible? If not, I'll just put games/necessities on it. Thanks in advance.
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External HD
- Thread starter DarkRevenant
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Normally you should have twice the size for a back-up disk than the disc you backup so you have at least 2 versions of a file. With a 250Gb disc you should be looking at 500Gb for back-up. I would use the 320 for data/games and get a 500Gb for back-up.
Thanks for the input, but that is not an option for me. Backup isn't a huge deal, its just a precaution. I'm just a student and I baby my laptop.
you would use the partition feature of disk utility
in the list on the left, make sure you click on the entire drive, will be all the way to the left of the list, and not indented.
click partition, and add partitions, for time machine partition you will definitely want hfs+ journaled, for the other partition you probably want "ms-dos (fat)." There is a 4GB file size limit, but it is readable and writeable by both mac and windows without any extra software. so as long as you aren't doing HD movies, you should be ok.
If you think you will want to put single files over 4GB on the other partition, you'll have to use another format.
you will loose anything already on the external hard drive when you do this.
in the list on the left, make sure you click on the entire drive, will be all the way to the left of the list, and not indented.
click partition, and add partitions, for time machine partition you will definitely want hfs+ journaled, for the other partition you probably want "ms-dos (fat)." There is a 4GB file size limit, but it is readable and writeable by both mac and windows without any extra software. so as long as you aren't doing HD movies, you should be ok.
If you think you will want to put single files over 4GB on the other partition, you'll have to use another format.
you will loose anything already on the external hard drive when you do this.
for 74$ at walmart you can get a 640 gb my book essentials 2.0 i believe. anyways, ill be getting it for a 320 gb alu. 
good deal.
good deal.
If you have any data on your system that is not easily and completely replaceable, I would sure suggest another look at backups. While babying your laptop is certainly good, there are just way too many ways and too many reasons for a hard drive to suddenly fail to not have a valid backup if you have any data that it will hurt to lose.
If you have any doubt, keep an eye on the forums for the number of times people without backups (particularly with laptops) ask for help since all their "important stuff" is on the drive that suddenly shows up only as a flashing question mark at startup.
The options are
Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Mac OS Extended
Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)
Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive)
Free Space
I assume the hfs+ is "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)", but what is the other fat 32)? I also know no file can be larger than 4 gb, but that means that i can still put a game on that is 10 gb right? Thanks again.
You can still place a game on there.
Its a bit intricate how it details what kind of file constitutes the 4gb file size limit, as its for an individual file..as i have alot BR back-ups on my Fat32 drive that streams to other computers and mediacentres.
for more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat32
As far as harddrives go, you can certainly even just get a matching size drive, Time Machine is not going to copy free space, lets say you are only using 10GB of your macosx drive, its just gonna copy that 10GB, then when the hourly backups occur and say you delete 4GB of space, it will copy that 6GB over, but you add 20GB of data to it, it will then copy that 20GB plus the remainder of what you have on your drive aswell, so 26gb (which consists of everything you had before)
if that made much sense, its wise to have twice of your drive, just depends on your needs. and atleast one Bootable clone of your main OS drive would be beneficial.
Thanks for the tidbit on Time Machine, but I am partitioning it because I didn't think I could have Time Machine AND be able to put games on it on a hard drive formatted the same way. Also, Can anyone tell me which type of formatting I should use? Thanks.
You'd probably want to do a partition prior to initializing with TimeCapsule.
if these games are strictly for Windows, format it to NTFS (if you dont need to read/write to it in OSX) in Windows so you dont get limited by FAT32 if it comes down to it and then let Time Machine initialize the 250GB of that drive.
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However if your placing this on a network, such as a TimeCapsule or AirPortExtreme, id say do a full HFS+ format as the AEBSn and Time Capsule with HFS+ formatted drives attached to it can be read/written to by both OSX and Windows.
I am going to do 1 partition of hfs+ journaled and the other fat32 but i dont see where these choices are. Disk Utility gives me an option of
Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Mac OS Extended
Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)
Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive)
Free Space
Where do I go now? Thanks.
Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Mac OS Extended
Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)
Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive)
Free Space
Where do I go now? Thanks.
Also, since I currently have my regular hard drive partitioned because I run Windows XP on it, will I need to account for the space on that for Time Machine? The partition was made to be 32gb for FAT32 so OSX only account for about 200 gb of space on the HD. For Time machine do I need to set aside 232 gb of space or 200 gb? Thanks in advance.
No, that does not need to be taken into consideration. Time Machine will not back up anything but Mac OS Extended formatted partitions, so your FAT32 partition will not be included with TM backups. To backup that partition you need to do it separately with the free Mac program WinClone.