How do you resize existing partitions on an external hard-drive without deleting their contents?

Hi, I've got an external hard drive (1 GB Western digital) Which I bought with a view to both storage and time-machine functions.
Initially, I partitioned the hard drive such that I had 750 GB for the time-machine segment, and 250 GB for the storage segment.
Now that my storage is approaching the 250 GB limit, and my time machine is only taking up 80 of the alloted 750 GB, I want to transfer some of that space across so that I'll have more room for storage.
When attempting this on disk utility, I can reduce the size of the time machine partition, but I am unable to increase the size of the storage partition.
Can someone please advise what I should do to sort this out without deleting the contents of each partition.
Regards,
Josh

Well, this is not easily answered. You can shrink existing partitions in order to add additional ones. But in order to add space from one partition to another that can only be done by first removing the lower partition first. If that partition has data, then it will be lost. Unfortunately, Disk Utility cannot manipulate partitions in place. You need a third-party utility for that, iPartition 3.4.1.
Now with that said I'll pass on a bit of advice. Do not us your Time Machine backup drive for extra storage. External storage and backups should be kept on separate drives. I suggest you get a separate drive for your storage or Time Machine backups.
If you use Disk Utility you can shrink your Time Machine partition, but the only way to put that space in another partition is to first delete the storage partition, then recreate it with a larger capacity.

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