time machine and external HD / want to only use half of it

[Drecca]

Hey guys,

Is there any way to partition my external HD so only half of it is used for time machine and the other half can be used like an actual external HD? I googled and some said it was possible, but provided no instructions..

 

[Detrius]

Yes. You partition it like normal and point Time Machine at one of the two volumes.

 

[Denarius]

Hey guys,

Is there any way to partition my external HD so only half of it is used for time machine and the other half can be used like an actual external HD? I googled and some said it was possible, but provided no instructions..

You can also do with with a single partition if you create a sparsebundle of the maximum size that you require.

Use the following command locally in terminal and copy the resulting file to the drive that you want to be the time machine drive.

 hdiutil create -size <number of gigabytes>g -fs HFS+J -volname "My Backup" <machine name>_<MAC address of en0>.sparsebundle