External Harddrive, time machine issue

alright im sure this is gonna seem sorta confusing but here it goes. right now i have a 160GB hard drive, and 40 GB of stuff on my 250GB external harddrive. all of it is full. and now i was wondering if i could back up the 200 GB of info (160 on hard drive and 40 on external) onto my external hardrive using time machine because i have i still have 210 GB left on my hard drive. hopefully this makes sense. thanks!

First, if you have 210 GB of free space and wish to backup 200GB of data, it won't work - the TM backup drive should be about twice as big as what you want to back up to allow for expansion as newer backups are made.
Second, I'm not totally sure about this, but I don't think you can have a TM backup drive that contains the backups AND other data and have that other data backup as well. In other words you can't have TM backup data from an external drive to the same drive (otherwise it will backup the backups).
You can have files on your external drive and also use the rest of the external's free space to backup your 160GB internal drive.

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