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joe01

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 8, 2008
90
0
Tx
I was wondering can any external harddrive be used with time machine ?
 
Pretty much. Just plug in a drive and see if your Mac recognizes it. It may need a reformat if it was used with a PC.
 
Yes you can. It will have to be reformatted into the mac format HFS+ for Time Machine to recognize it. Time Machine will prompt you to refomat it when you start the program and choose the drive.

I recently purchase a 320 GB Maxtor One Touch 4 mini and am using it with time machine to back up my new 2.4 Alu Macbook and it has worked great. I don't leave it plugged in all the time, but when I do plug it in Time Machine auctomatically starts and updates the backup.
 
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