Ah! Our hosts managed to resurrect the missing posts. I'll drop them back in here. It's going to look a bit odd on the bottom where the rest of our replies to each other are.
The other folders are just separate backups I made for certain things I probably felt were so important I dragged them to that drive.
Well, you can do that, but as I described above, TM will eventually delete them as the oldest files when it needs to make room for newer backup data. You will eventually lose them.
Before continuing, you absolutely need to copy those important files and folders sitting on the TM drive somewhere else. Otherwise, you will lose them in the following steps. Put them on a flash drive, another external drive, or something. You cannot otherwise continue.
What you are saying is to partition into two parts; one for the system and the other for time machine? Could you explain how to clone the internal drive?
Launch Disk Utility. Click on the physical drive name of the external drive at the far left. Note the difference between a physical drive name the names of the logical partitions you see on your desktop:

With the hard drive selected, you'll have a Partition tab at the right. Click that. Where it says Current, change it to 2 Partitions. By default, it will split the drive into equal parts. You can resize them by dragging the dividing line between them or clicking on either graphic display of the partitions and then entering a size at the right. Here, I split a 2 TB drive into a 100 MB partition (more than big enough for OS X and my third party apps), and the rest for the second partition.

You can give them names here instead of Untitled by filling in the Name: field, or do it later at the desktop when the partitioning is done. Make sure each is Mac OS Extended (Journaled), which they will be by default. Click Apply. It only take about 20 - 30 seconds to complete.
Now click on your main startup drive at the left. The name you see on the desktop this time, not the physical drive name. Choose the Restore tab at the right. In this case (below), I had highlighted my boot drive before selecting Restore, so it already filled in the Source drive with that name. Now drag and drop the smaller partition you made on the external drive into the Destination field. Click Restore. Your internal drive will be cloned to the external drive. When it's done (it will take at least 20 minutes), you can exit Disk Utility.

You can now startup to the cloned external partition and use the remaining space on it as your new TM drive.
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broadway alJul 6, 2015 3:59 PM Re: Re: sleepmode virus
Re: Kurt - Re: sleepmode virusin response to Kurt Lang
excellent Kurt. I just dragged all those folders to a thumb drive with one exception. The TM or "Backups.backupdb" as it's called. Should I drag that to a separate thumb also?
When I try and copy time machine to a thumb I get:
The backup can’t be copied because the backup volume doesn’t have ownership enabled.
Kurt LangJul 6, 2015 3:59 PM Re: Re: sleepmode virus
Re: Kurt - Re: sleepmode virusin response to broadway al
That file is used by TM. You don't need it on the thumb drive.
broadway alJul 6, 2015 3:59 PM Re: Re: sleepmode virus
Re: Kurt - Re: sleepmode virusin response to Kurt Lang
When you say "
That file is used by TM. You don't need it on the thumb drive."
I don't know what you're referring to. I'm about to partition my time machine hard drive but I haven't back it up anywhere. I think your reply was sent before I responded . in any case I'm getting an error to back up tm
The backup can’t be copied because the backup volume doesn’t have ownership enabled.