Partitioning an External Drive

29 Dec 2020 16:05:25

Roy Rainford

I have a new 2TB WD external drive for my MacBook Pro, OS Catalina 10.15.7. Am considering partitioning 50% Time Machine and 50% as a bootable clone of the MBP HD (500 GB SSD).
The Apple User Guide, https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/disk-utility/dskutl14027/19.0/mac/10.15, says “with APFS you shouldn’t partition your disk in most cases. Instead create APFS volumes within a single partition”. This is different to my previous partitioning experience so am just asking if I should follow that guide?

Re: Partitioning an External Drive

29 Dec 2020 16:16:16

Douglas Cheney

I have 2 TB HD partitioned with 500GB as a SuperDuper backup which is APFS and the rest of the drive is a time machine backup which is Mac OS Extended

Re: Partitioning an External Drive

29 Dec 2020 18:41:47

Derek Wright

Sorry to be a miserable so and so, but if you have to sets of backup on one spindle then you only have one backup.

To repeat an oft said mantra:

Data does exist unless it exists on two or more devices

Re: Partitioning an External Drive

30 Dec 2020 11:47:52

Roy Rainford

A valid point Derek thanks. I will rethink on what I put on the new external drive.

Re: Partitioning an External Drive

31 Dec 2020 08:34:43

David Moon

Whilst Derek’s point 100% correct, if you still want to proceed, I think you still need to partition drive as Time Machine won’t run on APFS. You could have one partition formatted APFS and the second for Time Machine formatted Mac OS Extended (journaled).
Much better, get a separate drive for each formatted accordingly.

Re: Partitioning an External Drive

31 Dec 2020 11:41:55

Roy Rainford

Thanks Douglas and David. Am now thinking of just having a clone of the HD on one partition and another partition for the images and documents transferred from the iMac. I already have a clone on a separate external drive and another drive with the images and documents. Both drives have space for new images and I am saving new documents to iCloud Drive. So I wonder if I need a Time Machine backup?

Re: Partitioning an External Drive

31 Dec 2020 23:27:57

Derek Wright

Time machine backups help you get out of problems you have just created (assuming that you are doing a regular time machine backup) ie you can recover a paragraph of text you have just deleted in error as long at the Time Machine frequency is shorter than the time between creating and deleting some data.

Re: Partitioning an External Drive

1 Jan 2021 13:17:49

Roy Rainford

Another good point for TM Derek thanks. Having another rethink about it!