Formatting an external hard drive for Mac/Time Machine.

Hello-
Just purchased a Time Capsule to use both as a wireless Network and backup hard drive. Both are working great. However, I have an external hd (500 gig "My Book") I used with a previous computer (PC). I would like Time Capsule/Time Machine to backup everything on the My Book external hd but I realize I need to reformat in order to have the Time Machine backup this drive. It appears that the only way to reformat the external hd is to erase it's contents. This isn't an option for me as this drive is almost full and has a ton of data I do not want to lose. Can anyone elaborate on how I can reformat this disk so it will be compatible with my new setup without losing any of it's contents? Thank you for your time and help.
Matt

Some 3rd-party apps, such as iPartition, claim to be able to do that. But they +*very prominently+* warn you to back up first, in case something goes wrong. And there have been a few posts here where something did go wrong and the user hadn't backed-up, so lost everything.
iPartition (and I think all the others) cost money, of course. Instead of spending it there, your best bet is to get another external HD, a larger one. Copy the data to it, reformat the WD, and copy it back. Make sure Time Machine is backing-it up to your Time Capsule (ie., not listed in the exclusions box of +Time Machine Preferences > Options).+
Then erase and partition the new one. One partition should be at least as large as your Mac's internal HD, the other 500 GB or more. Use this drive for "secondary" backups of both, via CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper. [CarbonCopyCloner|http://www.bombich.com> is donationware; [SuperDuper|http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html] has a free version, but you need the paid one (about $30) to do updates instead of full replacements, or scheduling.
You might even want to get a portable HD for this, so you can take it off-site and also be protected against fire, flood, theft, direct lightning strike on your power lines, etc.

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I have a 250GB western digital external hard drive for my time machine backups. if i just want to backup and recover my photos and movies how do i do that with time machine?

I have a 250GB western digital external hard drive for my time machine backups. I did not download the software that came with the external HD. If I only want to backup my photos and movies from my Macbook how do I do that in Tme Machine with my external HD?

Format the HDD in Disk Utility>Erase to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and the open System Preferences>Time Machine and set up the external disk as the Time Machine HDD. Then look at the Options, and exclude what you do not want backed up.
Ciao.

Trying to use a new, larger external hard drive for my Time Machine backup. However, every time I start the backup, it gets started then fails. And, I can't delete the few files that did save on the external. Sort of a catch 22. Any ideas?

Trying to use a new, larger external hard drive for my Time Machine backup. However, every time I start the backup, it gets started then fails. And, I can't delete the few files that did save on the external. Sort of a catch 22. Any ideas?

Is it a USB hard drive? USB hard drives have the problem of not giving full speed if they are hooked up on the same bus as keyboards and mice. Double check your profiler to make sure that is not a problem. If it is Firewire, make sure there aren't other firewire devices in use at the same time. I recommend not only keeping a Time Machine backup, but also a clone, and if you do use Time Machine, to make sure the Time Machine drive or partition is at least twice the size of the original drive.

OS is Mountain Lion, upgraded no problems, used an external Hard drive for my time machine, now my iPhoto will not show any of my photo's or ay new ones I import! Help please!!

OS is Mountain Lion, upgraded no problems, used an external Hard drive for my time machine, now my iPhoto will not show any of my photo's or ay new ones I import! Help please!!

Do you get this window when you hold down the Command+Option keys and launch iPhoto?
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OT

How can I use one external hard drive for both Time Machine and iPhoto Library?

I have been using a 1 TG LaCie external hard drive for Time Machine backups. My (older) Mac has 160 GB and is almost full. I would like to move my iPhoto Library to the external hard drive, but I've heard Time Machine doesn't share one space well. Should I
1. create another partition (but will this erase what I've already saved) with Disk Utility? *I am running Snow Leopard*
2. create another volume to use for iPhoto, and if so, should the two volumes be of equal size?
3. leave it with one partition and move the iPhoto Library to the same partition with Time Machine back ups?
I know I don't need the entire 1 TG for back up of 160 GBs. Please advise the best path to take. Thank you!

You are getting incorrect information from your ASP. If you look at drive specifications the heat generated is no different for high vs low capacity drives.
I have upgraded the internal drive in my iMac 2007 with a 3TB Hitachi drive without any heat issues or other problems.
Larger hard drives have higher density platters so to access any given amount data the drives travel a shorter distance. Higher capacity drives should therefore run cooler than lower density drives because the drive spends less time spinning to access data.

Transferring 650 gb to a new external hard drive for my time machine. It is going real slow. Says it is going to day days. After an hour or so it stops and I have to start again. When I restart, it starts where it left off. I'm not always here to resta

I have a new external drive for my time machine. My hard drive of 650 gb is full. It is reallyslow backing up to my external drive. I have to stay near by as it stops after an hour or so. If I'm not here to restart it, I lose all that time it could have been backing up. It says it is going to take 581 days. Eventually it will say 12 days. Back up time is all over the place. How can I keep the machine backing up when I sleep at night.
Gerald

I would go into your  in the upper left corner of the mac
Click on system preferences
Click on energy saver
Change the computer sleep and display sleep to never.

I cannot find the best way to format an external hard drive for MAC, PC, TV?

Hello,
I have a problem: I want to use an external hard drive on my Mac as well as on a PC and a TV. The normal structure of Mac (Journaled) isn't supported by PC/ TV. I changed the structue into DOS(FAT) on my Mac. That's suppoerted by TV and PC. But I'll use the hard drive for storage of HD films so I'm afraid that the structure is not good enough for this (it seems old to me DOS.....) And I don't want the quality to be influenced by a bad structure.
Then I've formatted into NTFS on my PC, but then I cannot put files from Mac on the hard drive.
What is the best solution?
Hope someone can help me!
Regards, Kim

FAT works great, but the problem is that it's old and that you can't store files that are bigger than 4 GB. In this case, you have exFAT, a filesystem compatible with OS X and Windows, but I don't think that the TV will read it.
If you want to use NTFS, you need a third-party application to be able to write in it on OS X, like Paragon NTFS

Formatting an external hard drive for mac.

Hi- I just bought a SimpleTech Pro 1TB External hard drive from Best Buy. I already own about 4 other external hard drives of various brands (WD, Maxtor, Seagate, Etc.). If I remember correctly, in the past to format those drives for OSX, I've just gone into disk utility, selected the drive on the left, and went to the erase tab, chose volume format: Mac OS Extended, named it, clicked erase and a few minutes later my drive was ready for use. For some reason now I am getting an error (format failed) shortly after I click erase. It will allow me to choose fat32 to format the drive, but whenever I try for a Mac OS format I get this same error. Any ideas?
By the way, I tried this on a Seagate drive yesterday and the same thing happened. So I returned it thinking it wouldn't work with a mac. So I don't think it's the drive.

Choose partition and GUID in option and after format in HFS+
Message was edited by: Nardac

Format an external hard drive to make Time Machine happy?

I have 2 Macs, and have partitioned an Iomega external hard drive (IOMEGA 500GB DSKTP USB 2.0 HRD DRV-USA), purchased from the Apple website, to have a sector for each, so they can work with Time Machine. The new iMac works flawlessly.
However, my G4 Powerbook, upgraded to Leopard, has the problem where Time Machine recognizes the drive, starts to back up the computer onto the formatted (Mac OS Extended (Journaled)) sector of the HD, but does not complete the backup. I have attempted to erase and reformat the HD, but to no avail.
I have tried to find out how to format a Mac disk, since this is the advised fix, but I can't find out how to do so, aside from re-partitioning in Disk Utility, which didn't work.
Does anyone have a fix for this problem?

i have had mixed results with time machine on external drives as well
at work - a g4 dual 1ghz, i can use time machine flawlessly on a LaCie FW drive, I have used it several times to recover files, it works as advertised.
for home - a 1.8ghz g5, I purchased a Fantom G-Force MegaDisk 1TB eSATA / USB 2.0 External Hard Drive and had serious troubles. 1st, I could not format the drive from that mac on several different usb ports (unfortunately i do not have an eSATA card), I kept getting an error message (sorry I can't recall it right now). I had to use my wife's powerbook (10.4) and it formatted no problem. Now, however, my 1st time machine backup is not yet complete after 24 hours (it was 500gb, but seriously, 24 hours?).
I may consider bagging time machine at home in favor of a RAID set-up
what a shame.

Can't use my external hard drive for the time machine

I have a mac mini and i'm having a time trying to back data using the time machine to my external hard drive

you need to format the external drive. To do that (if haven't got anything important on that external hard drive at the moment) select finder > Go menue > then utilities > open disk utility > then select you external hard drive and partition it to the size you want and format it the Mac os extened journaled.
Once you have done the above, re open time machine from system preferences and brows the disk. Time Machine will then re format it to its own format and start backing up.....

What is the best external hard drive for iMac time machine?

I need to purchase 1TB external hard drive to use as a backup drive for iMac (lion) Time Machine. I currently have the Lacie little disk but I need more storage. All I need is a simple USB connection.

I've been happy with my silver FW Western Digital drives, I use two daisy chainned together (1TB, 2TB). These were the ones sold for mac's so they have a aluminum look to them. Only a bit more expensive than their black USB brothers.

Formatting LaCie External Hard Drive for MAC and PC

Hi,
I just recently purchased a LaCie 500 GB Hard Drive from the Apple Store in order to back up and store most of my PC (Window) files. Most of my files that I need to back up are on CD, DVD, and USB mini drives. I was thinking of transferring the files through my MacBook Pro but I'm not sure how to partition the hard drive, since most of my files are generated from PC's and I would need to connect the hard drive to a PC in the future anyway.
From what I understand, the files that I save in the Windows partition will only be recognized when on a PC, and the same for the MAC. But what about simple compatible files that are read cross platform, such as Word documents? Would I still only be able to access each file depending on the platform and the partition?
Is there a way that I can just partition it into a single storage space – as how servers store data, regardless of whether it’s a PC or MAC file? I’m also wondering what would happen if I were to plug it into my laptop first? If it doesn’t ask me to partition the drive on my PC, will it ask me when I plug it back into the MAC afterwards? And if I partition it then, what would happen to my data?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you

Hi, njoay
I just moved to Mac from Windows last week onto a new MBP. I purchased a Lacie 500GB ruggedized drive. Here is what I know and tried:
1) If you format the Lacie in Mac format, then you can't use it on a Windows machine without software eg MacDrive.
2) If you format the Lacie in NTFS, you can only read from it when connected to Mac without other software.
I work a lot with VMWare, so I need the LACIE to be able to connect to both PC and MAC. I found a solution from another MAC user: "Paragon NTFS for Mac OS" (see http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/) which you can purchase for US$39.
This is what I did:
1) connect my Lacie to my PC and formatted it in NTFS format.
2) Installed Paragon NTFS onto my MAC
3) Connected LACIE to Mac.
Here are the results:
1) Connection with USB2.0 from Lacie to Mac - it works (can read and write to LAcie formatted in NTFS)
2) Connection with Firewire 800 from Lacie to Mac - it does NOT work. The disk gets ejected. I have logged a support call with Paragon on this issue and am waiting a reply.
3) Connection with Firewire 400 from Lacie to Mac - have not tried it yet.
Hope the above helps.

Formatting an external hard drive for Mac and Windows

Hello,
I just bought a brand new Seagate Expansion Desktop Drive (2TB) and am trying to work out how to format it. I want to move all my photos and movies to it from my laptop so i have more space. I have a Mac OS X 10.5.8 laptop but i also wanted to make sure it was compatible with other Windows computers in case i need to use it on someone else's PC.
I've read through a few posts over the net and i am getting confused as i'm not IT-intelligent at all. I've seen there are possibly 4 different format types.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thank you!

Answered here: Formatting brand new external hard drive

When I try to format an external hard drive for Mac it keeps coming up as 'error'. Can anyone help me?

I've followed the instructions on the online tutorial but when it is trying to erase the data it comes up with 'volume erase failed, could not unmount disk'.

FAT works great, but the problem is that it's old and that you can't store files that are bigger than 4 GB. In this case, you have exFAT, a filesystem compatible with OS X and Windows, but I don't think that the TV will read it.
If you want to use NTFS, you need a third-party application to be able to write in it on OS X, like Paragon NTFS

How can I reformat my external hard drive from the time machine format to regular format?

Ok so when first starting out I got an external hard drive for my time machine, little did I know I would run out of space really fast and would need to buy a bigger and better hard drive. Now that I did that, I have my old hard drive that I would like to use for copying material form my laptop to my desktop. However, it is still set as my time machine and tries to back up my lap top every time I plug it in. Also, it says that about half of it is still filled with stuff. I erased everything on it. I just want to reformat it so that it is like I just bought it.

Tirrel wrote:
I had the same idea as you however when I tried going to Disk Utility and I tried to erase it an error message came up telling me that it is unable to erase.
Unable to erase, or unable to unmount?
If Time Machine is trying to back up to it, or some other process is using it, Disk Utility won't be able to unmount it. Turn Time Machine OFF; if you have the drive open via the Finder or any other app, close it or quit the app(s).
At worst, start up from your Install disc or other alternate source and erase it from there. If you're not sure how to do that, see the yellow box in #1 of Formatting, Partitioning, Verifying, and Repairing Disks.

Formatting an external hard drive for Mac/Time Machine.

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