Hi guys, I want to ask. Currently I have a new Macbook with 250gb size and a 1 tb external hard disk.

I was told by my uni to do Time Machine backup regularly for the new Mac by using the 1 TB hard disk.

The old Mac I’m using was 500gb size. The old Mac storage is about 70-80% full adi and I want to clear it and let my sister use.

Now. I want to put some songs, photos and files into the new Mac. And all the other stuff from old Mac will be in the external hard disk but easily accessible when I need it. At the same time, I still want to have ability to do time machine back up using the same hard disk.

TLDR

1. Wants to clear the old Mac and transfer all files into external HD
2. Some files want to be in new Mac and other old files stay in external HD but accessible when I want it.
3. Want to do time machine backup for new Mac using the same external HD

Possible? And how? Thanks


Old Mac: MacBook pro 13” mid 2012
New Mac : MacBook Pro 15” retina mid 2015 (not touch bar version)

WD element 1 TB External HD

1) make a time machine backup to your old mac. then make a USB bootable drive. boot into USB. u will get into recovery. go into disk utility. format hard drive. install new OS = u will have a fresh new mac.

or if dont wanna use USB

your mac must be connected to network, when startup press command+R. u will boot into recovery. same process as the above.

if u ask me, i would just upgrade SSD on the 13" mid 2012. its gonna be a whole new machine again. dont need to do any TIME MACHINE backup. take out old hard drive. make it external. you can always access your old files. install new SSD and new OS. voila

2) YES u can use the same TIME MACHINE™ hard drive to store your other files. just create another folder in the root. do not MESS with the folder "Backups.backupdb" as that is your TM folder

3) if 1TB is enough, yes u can use the same HDD. i recommend u get a 2TB above if u wanna store everything in single drive. can be done but risky. once the drive rosak, all your data inside rosak also hehehe

This post has been edited by firdausbhari: Sep 10 2017, 05:36 PM

Backup drive should stay as a backup drive only. Get another drive for storage use. A friendly advice for you. well that depends how valuable is your data to you. We have people that practice backup of backup and another backup manually

This post has been edited by wei: Sep 12 2017, 02:49 PM

I use time machine and have 2 more backup manually for my critical data. It just how you perceived your data information level of important. If it just a movie, games, apps then it not that important to make several copies.