

I was able to add an additional APFS volume to a drive that only has one volume that had already been set up for use with Time Machine by right-clicking the existing volume in Disk Utility and adding a new one.

If a disk has partitions, you can use one of the partitions for your backup disk.
#Partition external hard drive time machine mac#
You can use Time Machine with an AirPort Time Capsule, with a network-attached storage (NAS) device that supports Time Machine over SMB, or AFP, or with an external storage device connected directly to your Mac (such as a USB or Thunderbolt drive). These steps don't necessarily have to be done before configuring Time Machine to use the external drive. Types of disks you can use with Time Machine on Mac. Once you have done this, you can open the Time Machine utility and select the "TimeMachine" volume as a backup disk, and still have a separate "Files" volume that you can use for general file storage using typical utilities such as Finder. Set the Reserve Size to 400GB (or however much you’d like to reserve) and click OK.Name the new volume "Files" and click the "Size Options" button.Right-click the TimeMachine volume that was created above and select "Add APFS Volume".In the Erase dialog, set Name to "TimeMachine", set Scheme to "Guid Partition Map" and Format to "APFS".So, Time Machine backs up all the hard drives on your Mac to the external drive, but at the same time. Right-click the Samsung T5 drive in the left-hand pane and select "Erase". Even a partition on any of the drives will work.Connect the Samsung T5 drive to the Mac and open Disk Utility.Here are the steps that I used with a new, empty Samsung T5 1TB SSD: What I have done with my 1TB external backup drive is to add one additional APFS volume with a reserve size of 400GB that I name "Files" so that I can use the same external drive for both Time Machine and general file storage.
