using time machine for back up

treeman

treeman

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Mark
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Having had a minor incident earlier today, I've decide to get my act together and actually back up stuff other than photos.

I currently have an external HD attached to my imac for backing all my photos when I import in LR. I intend to use Time Machine to do the back ups for me, but If I use the same HD, do I have to partition it first or something?

At the moment it's just an HD full of individual folders of photos.

Any help greatly appreciated :)
 
Iam not entirely sure, you may have to format the drive for time machine, i know i did but that was when i bought a HD just for time machine. So not sure if it asks you to when it is already in use.

You may be best going on the apple forums maybe.
 
Mark, just to clarify, are the folders on the external HDD already on the iMac? Otherwise you'd be backing them up twice which might be a little pointless.

IIRC though, you only need to ensure you have enough spare space on your external HDD, not a different partition. Time machine stores the backup as a massive package, so as long as you have room you could still keep whatever is on the HDD initially.
 
As long as it is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) you are fine.
 
BUT.... all your backups on the same drive! Why not plug in a second drive and use that exclusively for time machine. It will be far safer for your data.
 
Putting all your backups on the same drive isn't actually backing them up imo. If a drive fails, generally it will affect all partitions on a drive and can actually make things more difficult to retrieve.

Having two copies helps where you may get a data error but that's rare.

Save your images on your Mac drive in your image folder and copy or sync that folder to another hard drive external or internal. That way you have some protection from loss.
 
Sorry I think I should have been clearer; My photos are all backed up on the external HD, but I want to use time machine to back up all my other stuff, Docs, Bookmarks, contacts etc.

So I'll have everything on the imac HD and an external HD, so in theory they wont both go down..... will they?
 
sounds like exactly how I do my stuff; photos on an external HD and time machine with its own drive. Format the drive you are going to use for Time Machine for Mac, plug it in and it will appear on the desktop, open TM preferences in system prefs select disk, use the options button to tell TM about anything you don't want it to back up, check the box that shows TM status in the menu bar, close the prefs and watch the TM icon at the top of your screen.
Make sure it does stuff and click it to check status.
Once in a while click it and check that the latest backup was some time earlier today apart from that I forget it's there until I do something silly and then it's magic.
I changed my TM backup drive recently as the old one had done 3 years so I thought it was time to upgrade it.
 
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