Timemachine and External HD challenges

IshDisturber · Dec 17th, 2007, 10:45 AM

Hello All,

I wanted to backup my my Macbook using Timemachine, but I am experiencing a few challenges that I need some help with.

I currently have an external HD that is NTFS format. I recently installed Paragon NTFS for Mac and that program has been working like a charm. However, when I try to use Timemachine with my drive, my Mac acknowledges the HD but I get a message telling me that I need to format the drive. The problem is that I have a over close to 180GBs of data already backup from my PC on it that I can't get rid of.

Is there any other way I can back up my Mac using Timemachine on to my NTFS drive?

Or...

Is there anyway that I can format and partition my external drive while preserving the data that I already have on it?. Ideally, if it would be great have a 50-50 NTFS-FAT32 partition.

Or... can someone suggest where I can rent an external HD to temporarily store my existing data and reformat my using my 50-50 strategy?

Thanks and happy holidays to all!

LiquidFiend · Dec 17th, 2007, 11:48 AM

I would suggest buying another harddrive for it, harddrives are cheap and timemachine would work best on a dedicated hdd. Plus you never know, you could need the extra space anyways.

This way you wouldn't have to worry about reformatting and possibly loosing the data you have now.

Vexel · Dec 17th, 2007, 11:56 AM

Time Machine has to be on a Mac OS Extended filesystem with Journaling enabled. So, you won't be able to do an NTFS/Fat32 split.

There are tools out there to partition drives with data on them.. but, I'm unsure of good ones. I would give MacDoc a call and see what he says if you're in the Toronto area. He would also have somewhere to temporarily store your data while you partition your drive.