I recently was able to upgrade my Mac (mini) to OS X Leopard thanks to a generous friend. One of the things I was looking forward to most from this upgrade was the use of Time Machine. Time Machine, if you don’t already know, is Apple’s new software that takes over the tedious and easily forgettable task of backing up your computer to an external hard drive. It’s pretty cool how it works, because you open up the crazy, space portal thing and you tell it you want to move this particular file back to, oh, say, Saturday’s version, before I messed it up by deleting it or saving over it. So it does a cool warp tunnel effect thing and the file is right back the way it was on Saturday. Yayy!

So, I have a hard drive I can use, and lots of files I want to protect, so I plugged them in and clicked on Time Machine. Oh, it wants to erase my hard drive. Huh? See, I have been using this external hard drive to back up files from this Mac and also my Windows laptop. But, Time Machine wants to use Apple’s super-special HFS+ disk format, one that is not compatible with Windows. But I still want to put Windows files on there, too!

So here’s what I did for anyone else out there searching for a solution:

1. I used Partition Magic on my Windows laptop to format my hard drive into 2 partitions, both FAT32 (Windows and Mac can both write to this)

2. Then when I plugged the drive into the Mac, I told Time Machine to use the second, newly created partition. So it did, and erased it and created it’s own HFS+ partition. So now it works! Now half is used for the Windows laptop, and half is used for Time Machine on the Mac Mini!

At least I think it works. I’m backing up the laptop now using a program called SyncBack. Then I’ll plug in to the Mac and let Time Machine do its thing. I’ll let you know if anything goes terribly wrong.

Also, I’m planning on hooking both computers up to a USB hub so that I won’t have to switch the USB cord from one to the other all the time. That should be nice.