These steps don't necessarily have to be done before configuring Time Machine to use the external drive. Once you have done this, you can open the Time Machine utility and select the "TimeMachine" volume as a backup disk, and still have a separate "Files" volume that you can use for general file storage using typical utilities such as Finder. Set the Reserve Size to 400GB (or however much you’d like to reserve) and click OK.Name the new volume "Files" and click the "Size Options" button.Right-click the TimeMachine volume that was created above and select "Add APFS Volume".Note the name of your external hard drive (probably Untitled) because you. Space stated needed for next backup 864.88 GB. Then I thought I should back up the partition of the macOS installer and.
Partition external hard drive time machine free#
First TimeMachine backup (since I last deleted the backup file as it was too big) Free space on disk 633.03 GB. Total space occupied by all backups 1.37 TB. In the Erase dialog, set Name to "TimeMachine", set Scheme to "Guid Partition Map" and Format to "APFS". Raw size of all files being backed up 562.65 GB.Right-click the Samsung T5 drive in the left-hand pane and select "Erase".Connect the Samsung T5 drive to the Mac and open Disk Utility.Here are the steps that I used with a new, empty Samsung T5 1TB SSD: What I have done with my 1TB external backup drive is to add one additional APFS volume with a reserve size of 400GB that I name "Files" so that I can use the same external drive for both Time Machine and general file storage.