Time Machine questions

[Silon]

I just bought a WD My Passport Ultra 2 TB and I have two questions about it regarding Time Machine.

Question1
In my household there is only one Apple computer. If i use Time Machine as backup software, will the backup be accessible by a windows computer. The reason I aks this is incase the scenario occurs where the only Apple computer in the house suddenly becomes unusable (for instance water damage).

Question 2
My computer has an SSD of 256 GB. My external drive has 2 TB. I'd like to partition the external drive to 2 partitions, 1 HFS+J for Time Machine, one ExFAT for movies, games and whatnot. Question is how big should the HFS+J partition be for Time Machine to work properly.

Also i'd like to hear any experiences using WD backup software on a mac.

 

[Dark Dragoon]

I just bought a WD My Passport Ultra 2 TB and I have two questions about it regarding Time Machine.

Question1
In my household there is only one Apple computer. If i use Time Machine as backup software, will the backup be accessible by a windows computer. The reason I aks this is incase the scenario occurs where the only Apple computer in the house suddenly becomes unusable (for instance water damage).

You would need extra software such as MacDrive or HFSExplorer to be able to read the HFS+ volume under Windows.

Question 2
My computer has an SSD of 256 GB. My external drive has 2 TB. I'd like to partition the external drive to 2 partitions, 1 HFS+J for Time Machine, one ExFAT for movies, games and whatnot. Question is how big should the HFS+J partition be for Time Machine to work properly.

It depends on how far back you want your backups to go, and whether in the future you would want to backup any additional drives to it, and how often you change/add/remove files. I wouldn't give it less than 500GB in this case.

Note that any data on the other partition should be considered at risk, as it is not being backed up to a separate drive. It is best practice to keep one drive for backups and another separate drive for other files, if at all possible. Otherwise a failure of the drive results in both the backups and your movies, games etc... being lost.

Also i'd like to hear any experiences using WD backup software on a mac.

No idea, I've never used the WD backup software with my WD drives. I'm not sure I would trust WD's software to work correctly, especially after the issues they had with Mavericks.

 

[Silon]

Allright, thanks a lot for answering my questions!

 

[Drgnldy1]

I just saw your questions and wanted to confirm that the WD software isn't necessary. I've been using WD external hard drives for over 6 years on my Macs and have never used the software. Now I delete it from the drive.