Partition

[willie45]

Hi


I am running Leopard and using Time machine onto a 500Gb external drive. I don't really want time machine to take up the whole of the exernal drive so I thought I would partition it. I have never done this before and have two questions:

1 is the disk utility quite capable of doing this easily and correctly? It seems very simple to use and almost too good to be true.

2 The time machine help says they recommend using the whole of a dedicate disk for back up. Will it have any adverse effect on my back up if I partition the disk I use?

These questions are probably very naive but I have not much experience of the mac system and not a huge amount of computing knowledge in general.

Thanks


Willie

 

[M@lew]

1) Disk Utility can do this fine.

2) Depends how much space you partition, but generally for Time Machine, the more space you have, the farther back your back-up's will go. So the more space you give it, the better.

 

[willie45]

Thanks m@lew

I will probably give it around 250Gb. I had picked up that something like Diskwarrior was much more robust and wondered if that was to be preferred. I will go ahead with Disk Utility now.

Willie

 

[maccompaq]

Thanks m@lew

I will probably give it around 250Gb. I had picked up that something like Diskwarrior was much more robust and wondered if that was to be preferred. I will go ahead with Disk Utility now.

Willie

Be aware that if you partition your drive, everything will be erased, but you probably know that.

 

[acearchie]

This is the current set up I have and it works flawlessly!

Continue with confidence!

 

[r88my]

As a side issue, does anyone know of a utility that lets you partition an external drive without losing the data? I have a 500GB external drive which i want to use with time machine too but it is holding data, which i cant copy anywhere because i don't have a second hard drive sufficiently big enough! Thanks

 

[72930]

As a side issue, does anyone know of a utility that lets you partition an external drive without losing the data? I have a 500GB external drive which i want to use with time machine too but it is holding data, which i cant copy anywhere because i don't have a second hard drive sufficiently big enough! Thanks

Leopard's Disk Utility can do this...

 

[willie45]

Thanks for the replies people. I haven't got round to doing it yet but will do it this week. I thought I would have to lose all the data on the drive and I'm quite surprised to learn that Disk Utility can let me keep it. When I get round to actually partitioning will the instructions be quite clear as to how to complete it while keeping the data intact?

Thanks

Willie

 

[maccompaq]

Leopard's Disk Utility can do this...

Interesting, but this is the first time I have seen this feature. If it is so, it will be the first time that Disk Utility would partition a drive without erasing it.

Confirmation, anyone?

 

[r88my]

You are correct. This is a new feature of Leopard.

Sorry to ask again what others are asking (I am "relatively" new to Macs and i have never used disk utility) you are saying that it will definitely not erase the data? It seems that when you get to the point in disk utility for doing the partition, it gives you the option of renaming the partitions and the disk itself which would indicate to me that the entire disk is going to be erased when you click apply? Thanks

 

[CRAZYBUBBA]

What i meant is that the ability to do 'live partitions' is new. I was told that this doesn't erase data, hence it's live whereas tiger would require a reinstall.. however, i don't run leopard so i couldn't definitively say.

 

[maccompaq]

Sorry to ask again what others are asking (I am "relatively" new to Macs and i have never used disk utility) you are saying that it will definitely not erase the data? It seems that when you get to the point in disk utility for doing the partition, it gives you the option of renaming the partitions and the disk itself which would indicate to me that the entire disk is going to be erased when you click apply? Thanks

I find it interesting that I have never read anywhere in the "New Features" of Leopard that Disk Utility will partition a drive without erasing it first. If it is indeed a new feature, I would think that Apple would be publicizing it all over the place since that would be a huge feature. I would be very cautious about this, because lost data is difficult to impossible to recover.

Since I do not use Leopard, I would be remiss to offer advice regarding it's use.

 

[willie45]

I went ahead and partitioned. At no time did I notice an option to do this without losing all the data on the disk. I might have missed something but if this feature exists its certainly well hidden!

Anyway the partition went well and all seems to be working fine.

Thanks to all

Willie