Time Machine initial setup

[downingp]

I should be receiving my copy of leopard on Monday. I went to the Apple store last night for the launch and started playing around with the new OS. I asked the mac geniuses about my question, but they didn't know the answer. I am sure someone here on macrumors knows the answer.
I have an external hard drive (mac os extended journaled) where I keep all my music. When I setup time machine on this external hard drive, will it need to erase the whole drive before creating its own folder? Has anyone personally had this situation where you already had docments, music, pictures, etc. on your external hard drive before configuring time machine?

thanks.

 

[xUKHCx]

It creates a new folder on the external drive in which it puts it's back ups so you can keep your original files them on there.

 

[downingp]

That makes more sense if it would just keep my music folders and create a new folder without having to reformat. There are some that have told me time machine has to reformat the external hard drive to a different format in order to use time machine; which would mean the external hard drive can only be used for time machine and thats it.

 

[tooshaggy]

Time Machine does not need to format anything--- if the space is already mac--- it just needs space!
Mine is taking up 114GB for the first backup.
I have not had a successful back up YET. It takes a LONG TIME!!!! HOURS.

 

[xUKHCx]

It didn't need to format my external at all. As long as it is in HFS+ you won't have any problems.

Edit:

Time Machine does not need to format anything--- if the space is already mac--- it just needs space!
Mine is taking up 114GB for the first backup.
I have not had a successful back up YET. It takes a LONG TIME!!!! HOURS.

It took about 4 hours to make my initial backup of 190GBs.

 

[stockcerts]

Time machine is not recognizing my external drive. It's mounted on the desktop. I used this drive when I had a PC, so do I need to reformat it from my Mac?

I'm also not sure how to go about formatting a drive from a Mac as I'm still a bit of a newbie. Thanks!

 

[xUKHCx]

Time machine is not recognizing my external drive. It's mounted on the desktop. I used this drive when I had a PC, so do I need to reformat it from my Mac?

I'm also not sure how to go about formatting a drive from a Mac as I'm still a bit of a newbie. Thanks!

Chances are your disk is either NTFS or FAT32 and so Time Machine can't use it. To reformat open disk utility in the Utilities folder. Select the drive in the left hand window. The select the erase tab and choose Mac Os Extended (Journaled)

 

[OllyW]

I had a very good in-store demo of Time Machine last night at the Leopard launch.

It doesn't format the drive in any way, you can share the drive with Time Machine for storing other stuff and the backed up files can be searched through in finder and copied and pasted the same as any other file on your Mac.

 

[DanB91]

Time machine is not recognizing my external drive. It's mounted on the desktop. I used this drive when I had a PC, so do I need to reformat it from my Mac?

I'm also not sure how to go about formatting a drive from a Mac as I'm still a bit of a newbie. Thanks!

if u have enough free space u can partition the drive w/out erasing any thing thanx to the new disk utility. just format the partition in HFS+

 

[stockcerts]

Thanks....I'll give that a try. I'm copying my files to my local drive. I'll reformat and copy the files back.

Thanks again for the help!

 

[KershMan]

One thing that will speed up Time Machine is to go into your Spotlight Preferences and add your backup drive to the Privacy tab. This keeps Spotlight from indexing the backup drive and can dramatically speed up the process.

 

[xUKHCx]

One thing that will speed up Time Machine is to go into your Spotlight Preferences and add your backup drive to the Privacy tab. This keeps Spotlight from indexing the backup drive and can dramatically speed up the process.

I did this but it really didn't make much difference, might have saved about 10 minutes but then spotlight has to index after wards which took about an hour (way slower than in Tiger) so all in all i probably lost time.

 

[downingp]

Thanks for all your input. My UTD disk should be delivered by Monday. Maybe, if I am really lucky, it will show up today

 

[stockcerts]

I'm about to reformat using the new disk utility but I'm not sure which volume format to use. Their are a few choices. I'm thinking Mac OS extended, but their are a few others. Thanks!