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Never used Time Machine before, I have a folder with about 60GB of data already on an external drive and was thinking of also using it as a time machine. If I enable the drive as a Time Machine will it erase my current data on the external drive? Or sync the current data to my computer? Or does Time Machine only look for files it has created?

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Thanks for the info guys, great help! – woodscreative Nov 15 '10 at 19:42
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Nov 16 '10 at 12:20

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3 Answers

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Time machine only looks for files it has created so will not affect the other files.

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up vote 2 down vote

Time Machine works best if you use your backup disk only for Time Machine backups. If you keep separate files on your backup disk, Time Machine won’t back up those files, and the space available for Time Machine backups will be reduced.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427

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but if these extra files are themselves backups of files that TM does not do well e.g. Virtual machines then usingthem on the disk does make sense – Mark Nov 15 '10 at 21:18
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up vote 1 down vote

Time machine creates its own folder and basically takes a snapshot of how your system's harddrive files appear at that moment. In the case where you need to recover your system, you simply load the "snapshot" and it instates how the system was at that point in time back on the system.

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