Time Machine backup to empty drive necessary?

[Spikey115]

I have an external hard drive which I keep my parallels virtual machines and other files. I would like to use this drive to backup with Time Machine. If I select this drive for time machine, will my mac erase the hard drive or will it only use the free space? I'm afraid to turn Time Machine on for this reason and want to make sure the already excising files will not be touched my Time Machine.

 

[EricNau]

Your disk doesn't need to be empty, but Time Machine requires its backup disk to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Since you're using this disk with Windows, it is not compatible.

 

[Apple Ink]

TM backups up to an xHDD without touching its other contents. It'll just create a folder called backups.backupb and put everything in this folder and nowhere else!
And whatever Eric says above also holds true unfortunately!

 

[Spikey115]

Sorry if I was unclear...the hard drive in question is formatted as Mac OS Extended(Journaled). Thank you for the info, I will now start using TM. Thanks!