I have an 2 TB external hard drive. It is formatted as NTFS format, supported by ntfs-3g which is installed using Homebrew. There is already about 500 GB data existing on it that I need to keep. I now want to use the rest of the space on it to store my TimeMachine backups. There is only one partition on the hard drive. I do not have other hard drives to shuffle the data. How can I start to use this hard drive to store my Time Machine backups?
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Would you not just use some third party application such a GParted to shrink the NTFS partition and add a new JHFS+ partition? To make a bootable GParted see "How to make and use an USB stick with GParted that will boot on a Mac?". – David Anderson Dec 08 '19 at 11:45
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Do you have access to another machine that is running Windows? – David Anderson Dec 08 '19 at 11:55
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I got impatient and burned the data I really need to keep into a DVD. Now I'm ready to just erase everything on the hard drive create two partitions, one NTFS, the other APFS. How to do that? – qazwsx Dec 08 '19 at 13:07
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@qazwsx Not APFS. Time Machine can only use HFS+. – benwiggy Dec 08 '19 at 16:47
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I think you are wrong. I just finished saving TimeMachine backup on one of the two new APFS partitions. Now I just need to figure out how to change the other APFS partition to NTFS for storing and sharing other data on macOS and Windows machine. Any tip? – qazwsx Dec 09 '19 at 02:51
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Time Machine can only work on a volume formatted as HFS+. So you will need to repartition this drive. A quick Google shows that it is possible to resize an NTFS partition, but this can't be done with Disk Utility on MacOS.
I wouldn't recommend playing with the partitioning on the volume if the 500Gb of stuff isn't also backed up somewhere else.
benwiggy
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1I wonder if you can create a sparse disk image on the drive and backup to that? I have done similar things over a network onto a Windows PC but not sure if it will work with a local NTFS drive that has a mounter sparseimage on it... – Steve Chambers Dec 08 '19 at 16:44