Very long Time Machine Question

[dynalmadman]

Hi guys,

Late 2013 MacBook Pro, 500gig.
WD My Passport 2TB external hard drive.

Presently, WD is setup as MBR. Has about 500Gb of movies/TV shows, etc on it. Started using the drive for Time Machine about 4 months ago, has about 300Gb of backup data in the backup folder.

My desire is to partition the drive without losing what is there, so I can give Time Machine its own backup drive and not have to worry about the other stuff on there.

I tried to partition the drive using the Disk Utility but I was told it needed to be GUID Partition map to do this, and mine is MBR. Hmmm. Dang.

Enter DuckDuckGo search. Found something called gdisk for command line, downloaded the .pkg, but when I try to install the package, I get 'File is damaged' and tells me to trash it. Redownloading the pkg results in same error. Ok.

Question: Is gdisk what I need, and if so, how do I install it? If not, what do I need?

I considered just copying my stuff to my MB and formatting the drive anew, but just barely don't have enough room.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to the solution!
Michael

 

[Garsun]

Here's my two cents.
The thing about backups is that that are the safety net you use when everything else goes wrong. They do you no good if some little flaky thing happened in the past to cause the backup to be unusable.
So my advice is to reformat the drive from scratch and have a nice fresh dependable platform for your backups.
It would also be a good idea to buy second backup drive to keep offsite so that you can alternate which one you're using onsite and which ones offsite. This backs up your data if somebody breaks in and steals all your stuff as well as gives you a place to stash things while you reformat.