Time Machine plus more on eternal HDD?

[craigc1264]

I just recently bought a 13" MBP. I had a Seagate Freeagent Desktop HDD that I had previously used for my PC. I dragged all of the important information off of it, and then started up TimeMachine. I want to use a portion of this HDD as my backup for TimeMachine, but I also want to still use it as an external HDD. Right now when I plug the HDD in, it comes up on my desktop with the TimeMachine logo on the drive, and it is called Time Machine Backups. Inside the drive there is the backup that I created. Can I just save to the drive just like an external HDD still, or is it totally devoted to TimeMachine now? Is my wife able to save to this drive still even though she is using a PC?

I am very new to this whole Mac thing, and any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[miles01110]

If you want to prevent TM from eating up your entire drive you need to partition it; one partition can be used for TM and the other can be used for whatever. If your wife wants to use the other partition for storage with her PC, you'll need to format it as FAT32 or NTFS. If you use NTFS you need Macfuse or NTFS-3G for it to work with your Mac, but FAT32 limits file size to 4 GB or so.

 

[mstrze]

Of course...any of this extra space NOT being used by TM will also not be backed up.

I have said it before, and I know I will say it again:

Keep your backup drive as purely a backup drive.

Spend $60 at any number of retailers and get yourself another external 500GB or spring for a 1-2TB drive for maybe 100 bucks more.