How to Partition Your External Time Machine Hard Drive
Now that almost every Mac PC comes with a very fast solid-state drive, Most of us have learned to live with much smaller storage capacities in our computers. At the same time, external hard drives are way more cheaper than before. That means it is very easy to get yourself an external hard drive that is big enough to partition for both Time Machine backups and external storage.
How Time Machine Works
Time Machine works by making historic backups of your Mac. This means that it holds older copies of files even after you modify or delete them, up until a time when you require more storage for recent backups. Thanks to these historic backups, you can "travel back in time" to restore your Mac’s data from days, weeks, or even months ago.
Be Careful When You are Storing Files on Your Time Machine Storage Drive
If you choose to use your Time Machine drive as your external storage, you might shorten its lifespan by doing so. And this is because the external drive will carry out way more read and write actions as you save, edit, and delete new files.
Backup Files on Your Time Machine Drive Without a Drive Partition
Technically, there is no need to partition your hard drive if you want to make use of it as your external storage as well as a Time Machine backup. All you would need to do is to start copying files and folders into the drive using Finder.
If your Time Machine backups are fully encrypted, you might be required to authenticate changes to the drive with your administrator password.
Just make ensure that you don’t modify or save anything to the Backups.Backupdb folder. This is where Time Machine keeps stores of all its backups.
You might also want to create a new folder, named Files, to clearly distinguish your regular files from your Time Machine backups.
Create a Partition to Keep Files Backup on Your Time Machine Drive
After you have partitioned a hard drive, your Mac would now see each partition as a separate drive. They would have distinct names, different amounts of storage, and you can use different file formats.
Unfortunately, making a new partition sometimes erases your external drive. That means you might lose any existing Time Machine backups. You can make a Time Machine backup after partitioning the drive, but your backup history will restart over from that point forward.
When you partition your hard drive, you would get to choose how much space to allocate for your Time Machine backups.
How to Partition Your External Drive
Attach your external hard drive to your Mac. Then go over to Applications > Utilities and start the Disk Utility. If you can not find it, press Cmd + Space to look for Disk Utility by using Spotlight. chose your external drive from the sidebar and click on the Partition button. Use the Add (+) option to create a new partition and enter the desired Name, Format, and Size for each partition by selecting it in the Partition options from Disk Utility in your macOS
Your Time Machine partition must make use of the Mac OS Extended format, but your file storage partition can make use of any format. Choose ExFat if you have plans of using it with Windows; otherwise, choose the Mac OS Extended.
When you are ready to create your own partition, click on the Apply button, followed by Partition. When the partition process has been completed, you should now see each partition as a separate drive in your Finder confirmation popup.
After partitioning your drive, you would need to set up your Time Machine again. To do this, open the Apple menu and go over to System Preferences > Time Machine. Click on the Select Disk and choose your new Time Machine partition to start creating a new backup.
Remember that your Time Machine backups would start from scratch from this date onward. Also, don’t forget that you would need to create separate backups for anything in your file storage partition.
