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How to Use A Timemachine Back Up Drive for backup and storage?

I bought a 1TB external drive, and installed a 1TB SSD in my Macbook Pro 13in Early 2011 i-5, and have 426gb free, the other 200 or so is for bootcamp. I used the external as a timemachine back up, but there should be some extra space right??? I need someplace for storage for my videos and photos for work, and I don't want to go out and buy another 500gb external. Can I just use the one for timemachine for both timemachine and storage?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on Mar 1, 2015 9:55 AM

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3 replies

Mar 1, 2015 10:03 AM in response to Niel

I plan on getting a second drive eventually but this is more of a last minute kind of transfer, i need to take a bunch of wedding videos and move them over to my laptop, and I don't have the money or time to get another external.



how would I use the current one I have for storage, because when I plugged it in it reads it only as a time machine back up and drive and opens differently, I don't have it on me now to test it again, but just drag and drop files into it?

Mar 1, 2015 5:09 PM in response to JimmyCheckers

As Niel said, you should keep your backups separate from your archive storage. Going a step further, you should be backing up your archive storage as well.


But if you are going to just do this short term and can afford to loose it if it is stored on only 1 place, then you could partition the external drive so you have a portion for archive storage and the rest for Time Machine. But move that archive storage to its own drive as soon as possible, and make sure it is included in your backups.

How to Use A Timemachine Back Up Drive for backup and storage?

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