How much should i partition for Time Machine?

[rjjk91]

I just bought a 500 gig external hard drive and was wondering how much of it i should partition to Time Machine. My mac is new so i think i have only used something like 40 gigs.

Also same question goes for if i want to clone my HDD?

 

[alphaod]

Well you want to give your Time Machine as much as you can spare. As with cloning, whatever clone you do will be the same size as the partition you're cloning.

 

[Fa7mac]

the recommended is double the size of your mac HDD or at least the equal size.

I have a 160Gb HDD Macbook and i reserved 320Gb on my 1TB external HDD for time machine when i did the partition

 

[rjjk91]

also what does this mean? When i go into disk utility and click on my drive there is a format tab. i have it in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is this what i want?

 

[miles01110]

also what does this mean? When i go into disk utility and click on my drive there is a format tab. i have it in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is this what i want?

Yes. I use 1.5x my internal drive's capacity for TM.