External Drive for Manual Data & Time Machine Information?

Hi All,
I'm new to the MAC world, and I'm loving every minute of it. However, with my continued use of the MAC and populating it with data, I now want to move some files off to a External HDD for safe keeping.
What I'm trying to figure out is if I buy a External HDD for my MAC, can I use it for automated time machine use as well as manually moving and creatng directories for my data?
So here's what I'm thinking coming from a PC world on this extenral HDD:
1 - A Directory for my downloaded software from the internet
2 - A Directory for my Manual File saves (Documents, Files, Pictures, and iTunes)
3 - A Final directory for my Time Machine backups.
However I don't expect to leave this drive into my MBP all the time, so is it worth while doing it this way? Or should I go for a smaller External HDD to do my manual file backups and look at getting a time capsule for the time machine backups?
The only concern that I have with the time capsule is that I already have a wireless router in the household, and don't want that items features to conflict with the primary router. Though I do like the idea of the NAS technology to keep that data online and backuped without havng to manually plug a drive into my computer all the time.
Any advice you can offer to get me to my ultimate point of a space for my manual data backups and preferabbly time machine backups would be appreicated.
Additionaly thoughts about not using time machine are definately appreciated, based on the way I want to backup the data.
I should also mention that I would prefer to keep the cost low, as the MBP acquisition of course consumed some financial resources. But again the saving of my data is equally very important as well!

yes you can do this but you should partition the external hard drive in at least two parts. keep one partition dedicated solely to Time machine backups. Do not put any other data on that partition. there are a number of situations when you might need to erase the TM partition and start backups from scratch and having other data there makes it quite inconvenient.
Another point is that you should back up all your data, not just the data on the internal drive. a backup is a second copy of the data, not the only copy. so if you keep other stuff on the external you should back it up too. therefore, if your internal drive is not big enough to hold all your data, ideally, you should get two external drives. one for extra storage and the other for TM backups of everything. TM can back up both internal and external drives. a TM drive can be a regular drive or a Time capsule. that's up to you. and of course, there are financial considerations here but you'll have to figure those out yourself.

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    Message was edited by: Michael271

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