Time Machine initial setup

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.

 

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

Edit:

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

 

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)

 

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+

 

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!

 

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.

 

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!