Time Machine

Who uses Time machine religiously?

I've had my macs for about 4-5 months now, but I haven't setup time machine because i was under the impression it was going to wipe my external drive?I could partition my drive, but then i would end up with duplicate data on both partitions (music, video etc). Also i have some devices that don't play nice with HFS+ file format (which i assume time machine uses?) So I need to keep my FAT32/NTFS partitions..Any ideas for a solution?