I have an external drive and it already has extra information/files on it that I store to save space on my MBP HDD. Would I be able to set this as a Time Machine drive without losing the information on that drive? Or does Time Machine erase the drive when you set it up?
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Time Machine on in use drive?
- Thread starter JPT
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You'll need to partition the drive so that Time Machine won't eat up all available space eventually. Partition it in Disk Utility. You shouldn't lose any data already stored on the hard drive.
Yes. You can still use it for TM. TM just creates a folder on your drive for its backups and I believe it only deletes files from that folder when it needs to create space.
I never said it was impossible just stupid since TM will eventually eat up all the available space leaving you with no extra storage space. Partition it and be happy (takes maybe 30 seconds) leaving you confident you know exactly how much space you have for extra storage and how much TM will eat alive.
ok I am in the same boat but the drive I have is formatted in ntfs do I cant write to it, also I was in disk utility it will let me partition the drive but its not saying anything about not losing current data or anything about it, is there something I am doing wrong?
It has to be Mac OS X extended to be able to change the partitions, or to write to it for that matter. So you will need to format it. Remember this deletes everything on it.