Using time Machine but what if my HD Runs out of space?

[xelentoliver]

I am about to buy an external Hardrive for my Macbook to backup using time machine, but the external HD is 1 TB and my MB is only 250GB. Can I install applications and add files to the external hardrive without putting the files on my MB HD by using Disk utility or something?

 

[KoolStar]

Time machine works in this order creates hourly back ups for each day then keeps each days every 6 hours then at the end of the week keeps 2 or 3 backups perday then at the end of the month it keeps one perday per month until drive is full, once the drive is full it then deletes alternating months based on the starting back up. Then likewise for years. Such that if you have 6 months of backups and your dive is full, you would have the first backup, then the next month and so on till that current month where you would have 4 weeks to choose from. The last week you would have 7 days to choose from, followed by the a six hour window for everyday but the current day where you would get a back up for each out. This is what I have seen on my server.

 

[xelentoliver]

Thanks for responding to my thread so quickly!!! But I'm not worried about time machine taking up space on my HD I was just wondering if I could put any new documents or applications onto my External Hardrive that I would have normally put onto my macbooks HD if you understand

 

[old-wiz]

If you're going to share the time machine drive with applications it's a good idea to partition the HD into two parititons; 1 for time machine and 1 for applications. This way the time machine doesn't take over the entire phsyical disk.

 

[xelentoliver]

Ok thanks, do you know is it possible to partition an external HD into more than 2 parts because I was thinking about installing windows on my External HD via Bootcamp?

 

[Jaro65]

Just use your Disk Utilities to create whatever partitions you want on your external HD. However, leave Time Machine plenty of breathing space. The big advantage with Time Machine is that you can go back in time in case you changed/deleted some files you didn't want, etc. Obviously, the less HD space you'll allocate to your Time Machine, the fewer past images of your HD it will be able to keep.

 

[xelentoliver]

Thanks for the advice Jaro I will probably leave 500GB for time machine ;D

 

[old-wiz]

Ok thanks, do you know is it possible to partition an external HD into more than 2 parts because I was thinking about installing windows on my External HD via Bootcamp?

bootcamp will only work for the internal HD.