" This back up is too large for the back up disc. The back up requires 12.35GB but only 7.57GB are available…Open Time Machine preferences to select a larger back up disc or make the back up smaller by excluding files"
I went tp preferences & only had the one option & excluded 15GB of files to be not backed up. The above window keeps recurring only the back up requirement is slowly increasing. I have no idea how to select a larger back up disc or clear my WD500GB & start from scratch with my MacBook Pro Snow Leopard. I wonder if there is a simple solution to what appears to be a simple problem?
If you don’t mind deleting all of the files in the Passport, you can follow the link below for the steps to format it fromthe Disk Utility app.
How to partition and format a WD drive on Windows (8, 7, Vista, XP) and Mac OSX
I followed your advice & partitioned the WDdrive. What have I done that is changed? There is a drive icon on my deak top, what is that? What do I do now? Can I just disconnect the WDdrive, re- connect & expect it to do it’s back up thing as usual?
I wanted to enlarge the new intake area of the partition so that if I forget to back up this problem need not recur so readily. Can I not have some control over the partition size?
If you still wish to automatically backup your files, check the link below for the instructions on how to use Time Machine. By default the Disk Utility will only create a single partition, but from the Volume Scheme drop down window you can select the number of partitions that you would like to have.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427
Thanks for this link. Finally can you tell me why there is a partition (I think I can figure it out) but more importantly what several partitions would accomplish? In easy to understand english please.
Partitioning the hard drive space is useful if you want to use two different file systems, to use the hard drive on two different operating systems, for example NTFS for Windows and HFS+ for Macs. For internal hard drives, some users also like to create one dedicated partition for the operating system and use the other for data.
