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10.5: Run Time Machine on a single drive System 10.5
Contrary to popular belief, Time Machine does not require a second physical drive (or network drive) to store its backup files. It seems to be quite happy backing up to a secondary partition on the primary hard drive.

Use Disk Utility to create a dedicated HFS+ partition for Time Machine that is as large or larger than the partition(s) you want to back up (Disk Utility in 10.5 allows live resizing of the active system partition - yay!). After the partition has been created, use the Time Machine preferences pane to select it as the backup destination.

When you select the backup partition, you will receive a warning about how backing up to the same physical disk is not a safe as backing up to a second physical drive, but you are allowed to click through and do it anyway.

As warned, using a secondary partition as your backup does not provide the same hardware redundancy as using an external drive; however, for laptop users especially, the convenience of being able to store a "previous versions" backup on the internal drive might outweigh the risk. (If you do backup to the internal drive using Time Machine, make sure to keep a clone backup image on an external drive for disaster recovery.)

[robg adds: This previous hint explained another way to use a partitioned drive for Time Machine -- in this case, on a second drive with a separate bootable partition on it.]
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10.5: Run Time Machine on a single drive | 1 comments | Create New Account
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10.5: Run Time Machine on a single drive
Authored by: HP Sauce on Dec 13, '07 08:47:39PM

I'm trying this on a late '05 Powerbook with a 100gb drive, and have an odd problem with Disk Utility. I'm trying to split the existing single partition into two, but each time I attempt it I'm either told there isn't enough space (no matter how little I make it) or that the process failed due to file system errors - at which point repairing the disk notes Volume bitmap and Header needing minor repairs (which are then fixed, until the next time i attempt to partition).

Any ideas? Cheers.



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