
However large the sparsebundle you specified, it will only be a couple of MB big at this point. You can get a commandline script off the interwebs which does this step for you.Ĭopy the new sparsebundle image to your external drive. TimeMachine makes two demands of this sparsebundle: it must be named after your machine, and it must contain a specific. Or, as per comment, you can use exFat instead of NTFS.Ĭreate a sparsebundle disk image. There are a 3 main steps to using an NTFS or other non-HFS+ drive for Time Machine: This is how TM works with a networked drive it creates a sparsebundle on the network drive, and then mounts it. Time Machine can work on 'foreign' drives fine by using a sparsebundle disk image.
#WINDOWS DOESN'T RECOGNIZE HARD DRIVE SET FOR MAC MAC#
Yes, you can use a single NTFS disk for both Windows and Mac backups. My external 1 TB drive, which I use for backing up my Mac and my wife's Windows PC, has two partitions called "Time Machine" and "BACKUP_WINDOWS": Replace BACKUP_WINDOWS with the NTFS partition name. To prevent the NTFS partition from being mounted every time you connect the drive into your Mac add this entry to /etc/fstab (as explained here): LABEL=BACKUP_WINDOWS none fusefs_txantfs noauto When you're done, plug the drive again into every Mac/Windows computer and select the corresponding partition as backup drive (see here for OS X and here for Windows).

Luckily, you don't need two separate drives. In the Format menu for the partition that will be used for backups. Make sure "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" is selected If you want to partition the disk, click the Partition tab and

Manually preparing a new disk for Time Machine Your preferred setup is not possible: OS X can't share an NTFS disk with Windows for backup because Time Machine needs HFS+ (from ):
