windriya wrote:
I don't know much about NTFS, all i know is my dad backed up some files on the drive using his windows laptop for me to keep the files, if i reformat the drive will all the previous files be gone? This is not only my first time backing up a mac to a drive, it's all so my first time using a hard disk.
Very likely NTFS. then. NTFS is read-only on macOS. Will need to be reformatted to be used for Time Machine.
To be very blunt, those files—any files having no backup—are not precious.
How do I know that? Precious files, photos, and documents have one or more backups.
Files with no backups are one dunk, drop, accidental or malicious deletion, loss or theft, corruption, or failure away from loss.
All computers and all storage inevitably and inexorably fails, too.
That backup can be Time Machine or other automated backups, manually copying the files to hosted storage, or otherwise.
Time Machine to local or shared local storage is probably the most common backup means, on macOS.
Yet more valuable files get multiple and rotating and off-site / remote backups. As a guess, that’s what your parent is doing here with that hard disk drive, too; giving you a backup copy.
Hard disks are cheaper than data loss. Time Machine supports pretty much any hard disk, preferably two or three times the capacity of your storage, and multiple hard disks can be used for parallel backups. (Backup hard disks can and sometimes do fail, too.)
Move the precious files elsewhere temporarily, reformat the disk, and configure for Time Machine. Or get a hard disk just for Time Machine, and use that, and then migrate the precious files later and reformat and add a second Time Machine backup.
