Partitioned back up drive

[steveoc]

If one had only one external drive for backing up, is there any reason one couldn’t partition the drive using one for time machine and the other for a bootable clone of the internal start up drive?

Asking for a student on a tight budget

 

[komatsu]

When you increase the complexity, you increase the risk of things going pear shaped.

Over the years, I've seen way to many innovative and quirky set-ups like this go exactly that way...pear-shaped.

KISS - Keep it simple. Backups are too important to be messed with. One drive for backup and one drive for your bootable clone.(And some posters here, quiet rightly tell you, that even one backup is not good enough and you should be using a second backup medium like online backup).

 

[Fishrrman]

It depends on what you're using for a backup app.

I use ONLY CarbonCopyCloner to create ONLY cloned backups (of both booting and non-booting drives).

For this, I use either platter-based hard drives or SSDs that are partitioned so they can hold several backups.

Works just fine.

 

[Weaselboy]

If one had only one external drive for backing up, is there any reason one couldn’t partition the drive using one for time machine and the other for a bootable clone of the internal start up drive?

Asking for a student on a tight budget

It leaves all your eggs in one basket, so is not ideal, but it will work just fine.