Creating Time Machine backups and saving folders on same drive.

If your new external Seagate drive is configured with a single partition, it would not be a good practice to use that same partition for both Time Machine backups and for file storage. Instead, you should create separate partitions for each. This is best done when the drive is new to prevent data loss and I suggest that you do so.

In this case, I would further suggest that you reformat the entire external drive for APFS. With APFS, basically partitions are now called Containers. In turn each container can have multiple volumes. Regardless, I suggest using one container dedicated to TM, and the other, for file storage. You, of course, are free to create as many containers as you need and to which size each will be.

You may find the following articles an interesting read:

• Time Machine to APFS: Evolution - The Eclectic Light Company
• Time Machine to APFS: Understanding backups - The Eclectic Light Company

tartanmartin wrote:

Hi,

A few days ago I bought an external Seagate 8Tb Hard Drive for using Time Machine and also adding folders to in the future. When I erased the External hard drive I did it under Mac OS Extended Journaled, then when Time Machine asked me to Select Disk, I chose the Seagate drive, made the Time Machine backup, and found after the initial backup of my Mac had been done, the drive was now APFS (Case Sensitive) and I can't add any folders like I could do with previous hard drives. Can anyone suggest a method to to this please, or is Big Sur so different to Catalina that I'd need to partition the hard drive ?

Time Machine likes to have it's own dedicated drive.

When you start with a clean drive TM will automatically format it to APFS with Big Sur OS.