Can I safely save files to the external harddrive I am using as/for a Time Machine?

Can I safely save files to the external harddrive I am using as/for a Time Machine?

Because ALL Hard Drives fail. They have been since they were invented. It is just a fact of Spinning hard drives.
No nothing special about how TM writes to the drive.
Any hard drive can fail at any time. The day you take it out of the box and plug it in to 10+ years later or anytime in between. Kind of like Life. At some point it ends for everyone. Some sooner some much later.
I've had some work for years, like 7++ running 24/7. Others have died in months to a few years. I've had externals died faster then internal drive and the funny part is an external drive is nothing but the same type drive used Inside a computer, an Internal drive, put into an External case. But most of the time when an external dies it is not the drive itself but the Enclosures Electronic that fail. Removing the physical drive from the enclosure and using a SATA, or IDE, to USB Adapter the drives are usually still good. I've even taken dead externals and removed the drive and put that drive inside a computer case and they work for X number of years. But that doesn't mean that All Drives are like that.

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