Time Machine

[JForestZ34]

Just a quick question about time machine.. I have a WD 320GB external hard drive.. I want to use it for my back-up but my question is this.. On this hard drive I have about 10,000 songs I could still listen through Itunes. All of these songs were put onto the hard drive with a dell computer.. No big deal for me to take them and put them in itunes but anyway, would I be able to use this drive for time machine without losing my music or having to reformat the drive for OS X..

James

 

[scienide09]

Time Machine requirs the use of Apple's HFS+ filesystem (aka "Mac OS X extended journaled" in the Disk Utility program). You can reformat your HD to this filesystem, or else create a partition on the external for Time Machine use.

Formatting to change your drive settings means you will lose your music unless you create backups, as formatting in the entire drive completely wipes data.

Creating a partition and formatting only that partition for Apple's filesystem might work (leave the rest as NTFS or FAT32, whatever it is now), but it will put your music and other files on the external at risk.

Whatever you do, your best option would be to back up the contents of the drive if you want to keep that music.