Time machine question

Backups protect against two kinds of things (1) You being dumb and deleting something you shouldn't have and (2) hardware failures.

If you used a second partition then you would only have case (1) covered. You really should spend a few bucks and take care of (2) as well.

 

I think you will have to create a new partition for it to work. If you're talking about an external partition, so that the physical drive is not the same, then you're covering (1) and (2).

 

I'm assuming this is an external hard drive because it doesn't make much sense to backup your data to the exact same hard drive that the original files are on.

The current iteration of Time Machine requires a dedicated partition to backup to; you cannot simply specific a certain area of a currently-used partition. So yes, you'll need to either create a new partition map using Disk Utility or dedicate one of your currently existing partitions to Time Machine.

 

There is a very good FAQ about time Machine here.

You can find a lot of answers there.