[ThrillSeeker]

Hi, quick question.

Time Machine is rapidly eating up my 500GB external HD. If i use Disk Utility to partition the HD will it erase the data which is already stored on the HD at the moment?

ThrillSeeker

[Big Mac]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it will. If you had existing partitions you could use Disk Utility to resize them without erasing the drive, but if you don't and want to create partitions I think you do need to erase.

[TETENAL]

If it's rapidly eating drive space you might want to consider excluding objects that cause this:

• exclude disk images or convert them to the more Time Machine-friendly sparesbundle type of disk image
• exclude Paralles Windows images
• if you work with video files (or very large images) use and exclude a working folder and only have the finished results backed up
• exclude and manually back up the Entourage e-mail database

[Art Vandelay]

In Leopard, you can add a new partition to a drive without erasing the drive provided you have enough free disk space for your new partition.

[Big Mac]

Oh, cool. I heard something different, so I'm sorry to misinform.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by Art Vandelay 

In Leopard, you can add a new partition to a drive without erasing the drive provided you have enough free disk space for your new partition.

That requires invoking Disk Utility from Terminal though, doesn't it? The only partition option I see in the GUI version is to "erase and partition".

[Art Vandelay]

That was true with Tiger. In Leopard, you can use Disk Utility to manipulate partitions. Select your disk, select Partition, click the '+' button, size it accordingly, and finally click Apply.

[ThrillSeeker]

Well i did as per above and i can confirm it definitely works. Excellent! Thanks for you help.

ThrillSeeker