Time Machine

Officeworks is having a sale on WD 1TB external HDD. They are going for $299. But they are only USB2.0. After giving it some thought, I decided to take one home. It was not on display and you had to ask for it and the sales personnel had to go to the back of the shop to get it. And the sales people would not leave it with you to check out and think about. I was thinking about it for several minutes and the sales person just refused to let the HDD out of his sight. Anyway, I decided to take it in the end.

Once I took it home, I plugged it in and the WD software showed up. Time Machine then prompted me whether I wanted to use it as a backup drive, I said yes and it started backing up. It took a bit of time, apparently, almost 80GB of the disk is already in use (for a 200GB machine, that's a huge chunk, I suspect a big chunk of it must be iPhoto duplicates.)

The issue with Time Machine is that it just takes over the entire disk. What a waste if I have a 1TB disk serving no other purpose than as a backup. So, I decided to see if I can use it on my Windows desktop. I plugged it in and nothing shows up. I went into Disk Management and saw it but it is not assigned a drive letter and is marked as something called GPT, not NTFS or FAT32. No idea what that meant. I tried to assign a drive letter to it but none of the right click menu items are active.

After googling a bit, I decided to go into CMD and do a DISKPART -> CLEAN -> CREATE PRIMARY PARTITION. After that, I went back into Disk Management and was finally able to assign a drive letter to it. Of course, this meant that the Time Machine backup information is all gone!

I took the disk and plugged it back into the MacBook Pro, again, it sensed it and asked whether I wanted to use it as Time Machine. I decided not to but instead went into Disk Utilities and Partition. OS X has a relatively user-friendly Disk Partitioning software, but not as good a PartitionMagic. For one thing, I can't see how you can do non-destructive partitioning or partition resizing, unlike with PartitionMagic. It also has a limited set of File System support. It only support the Mac File Systems + FAT (not sure if FAT 32 but I assume it is).

I decided to go ahead and partition the disk, I partitioned 331.51GB as backup (roughly 1.5x the 200GB disk size in the MacBook Pro), not sure if this is the right size but I'll read more about how Time Machine works and what better recommendation there are for sizing the Time Machine disk. Until then this should do. The balance 600GB I formatted as Win32.

I have not tried the WD HDD in the Windows desktop PC since then. But I am assuming I should be able to use it for storing Windows files. If not, I'll worry about it when I get to that.


I wish Apple would provide a bit more information (through prompts/help/whatever) about how to size the Time Machine backup and then prompt you if you want to partition the disk if it is quite big (or advise you that you may not have enough or whatever). Then provide you with a utility which can do non-destructive re-partitioning of the disk.

Ah well, maybe some day. I can't really fault Apple here, at least the partitioning software and Time Machine came with OS X. PartitionMagic is a separate purchase in Windows. And I don't do backups on my Windows machine, except the occassional copy to DVD, which can be quite tedious. So, overall, I guess OS X breaks even with Windows with regards to this.