What's the right way to share an ext. HD with time machine and windows?

[alkemyst]

I am new to the macbooks...I picked up a 500GB external drive I want to use to move digital camera shots from a windows machine as well as use with time machine for backups.

The laptop drive is 250GB. Do I just make a 250GB GUID partition and then a MBR one for the windows side of things?

 

[TheStu]

What exactly are you planning on Time Machining? If everything on your drive, then I would recommend you use somewhere around 350GB for TM and the rest for the swap space.

As for how to partition the drive, you will want to go GUID for the whole drive (to the best of my knowledge you can't specify MBR/GUID for each partition). You will want to to the TM partition as HFS+ and the one for windows as FAT32 unless you plan to have files larger than 4GB on there.

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Time Machine requires HFS+

 

[alkemyst]

I would like to use NTFS for the windows...some of the files will be video camera and 1GB and larger. I supposed FAT32 could work.

I haven't played with TM...I'd like a full back up mostly at any given time. This machine will not have a ton of applications being installled over time.

 

[umrigar]

maybe this will help:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080411155517808

 

[VinylxScratches]

Run Windows in a VM.

 

[TheStu]

Run Windows in a VM.

Huh?

Care to elaborate on that?

 

[VinylxScratches]

Dual booting is a pain when trying to maintaing stuff. I guess in 10.6 you could save stuff on the Mac partition now and then have Time Machine back it up when you're in OS X.

I'm an advocate against dual booting, especially when there are solutions like Virtual Box that are free and less of a hassle.

 

[TheStu]

Dual booting is a pain when trying to maintaing stuff. I guess in 10.6 you could save stuff on the Mac partition now and then have Time Machine back it up when you're in OS X.

I'm an advocate against dual booting, especially when there are solutions like Virtual Box that are free and less of a hassle.

But if the OP needs full power for gaming or video editing then dual booting is the answer.

 

[alkemyst]

figured it out...wasn't talking about dual booting (running parallels)...wanted to use the drive for both the mac time machine and my windows 7 install and more importantly to grab files from other windows machines.