Is it possible to partition my M1 Macbook Pro and keep Time machines on a partition of the main drive?

[jebus197]

Hi, the title says it all really. Is it possible to partition my M1 MacBook Pro and keep Time machines on a partition of the main drive? I know I should probably keep backups on an external drive, but that isn't always possible. So say my drive is 1TB (which it is) and I wanted to reserve partition 300GB for Time machine backups, is it possible to do this, or does Mac OS require the whole drive to be free for backups?

[adrynalyne]

That’s an interesting idea, but also a bad one. What happens if the drive dies? You will not be able to recover those backups ever. 

[FrancoisC]

As the previous poster said, entirely and easily doable, but there'd be 0 advantage to doing so. If the drive or the Mac itself dies, it's all gone.

[Nick H. Supervisor]

It's not true that there is 0 advantage to doing this. For example, if you didn't have an external drive then having a Time Machine backup on the same drive could still be helpful to roll back from an update that went wrong. I have TimeShift enabled on the same drive that my Linux partition is on for this reason. But of course as others have pointed out the main point of the backup is preserving your system and data if the drive dies. Well if the backup is on the dead drive then your backup is dead too.

 

It looks like it could be possible. You would just need to partition your drive so that the partition for the Time Machine backups uses the Mac OS Extended File System. I don't know if GParted can create that File System, but I guess you could partition it as blank space using GParted, then use Time Machine to format the partition.

 

I'd be interested to know how you get on. I don't have a Mac so I can't try it myself, but it's always good to learn something new.

 

EDIT: Thinking about it a few minutes more, I guess what I said in the first paragraph isn't exactly an advantage, since that's still possible to do if Time Machine was on an external drive. But my thinking was that I don't always have my external drive when I'm traveling, so with TimeShift on the same partition I can perform the roll back wherever I am.

[cacoe]

The only advantage I forsee is being able to do a fresh install without losing the backup.

 

Remapping your user folder to a secondary partition might make more sense though if that's what you were thinking.

 

edit - oh and the obvious ability to have file versions saved too.

Edited July 12, 2021 by cacoe

[+Kyle Subscriber¹]

obligatory "to what end" question pops into mind, but to answer you assign a folder to be where it backs up to on the SSD. 

if you do this, please make sure you add the destination backup folder to the excludes list for time machine ;-) 

[+Matthew S. Subscriber²]

On 12/07/2021 at 04:42, Nick H. said:

It's not true that there is 0 advantage to doing this. For example, if you didn't have an external drive then having a Time Machine backup on the same drive could still be helpful to roll back from an update that went wrong. I have TimeShift enabled on the same drive that my Linux partition is on for this reason. But of course as others have pointed out the main point of the backup is preserving your system and data if the drive dies. Well if the backup is on the dead drive then your backup is dead too.

 

It looks like it could be possible. You would just need to partition your drive so that the partition for the Time Machine backups uses the Mac OS Extended File System. I don't know if GParted can create that File System, but I guess you could partition it as blank space using GParted, then use Time Machine to format the partition.

 

I'd be interested to know how you get on. I don't have a Mac so I can't try it myself, but it's always good to learn something new.

 

EDIT: Thinking about it a few minutes more, I guess what I said in the first paragraph isn't exactly an advantage, since that's still possible to do if Time Machine was on an external drive. But my thinking was that I don't always have my external drive when I'm traveling, so with TimeShift on the same partition I can perform the roll back wherever I am.

Don't need separate Partition Management apps on macOS, Disk Utility is all that's needed.  And yes you can run Disk Utility from the Recovery Environment (both local and internet recovery environments.)