Time machine Volume Requirements

Disk requirements of time machines

 

Time Machine can back up to any of these volumes:

Time machines can be backed up to any of the following Disks
● Internal volume other than the startup volume

Any built-in disks except boot Disks
● External USB drive

Mobile hard drive
● External FireWire drive

External FireWire hard drive
● External eSATA drive

External esata hard drive
● Network server via AFP (from machines running Leopard), including machines running File Sharing

Through the afp protocol,
● XSAN volume

Xsan Disk

 

NOTE: You can't select a Boot Camp partition, iPod, disk image, AirPort Disk, or iDisk as a Time Machine backup drive

Note: you cannot select the bootcamp partition, ipod, disk image, airport disk or idsk as the backup disk of the time machine.

 

The volume must have one of these formats:

The disk must be in the following format
● Mac OS Extended

● Mac OS Extended (case-sensitive)

 

Time Machine turns on journaling for these volumes if they are not already formatted as such.

If the disk has been formatted as required by the time machine, the time machine will be backed up directly.
You cannot use FAT32; if you connect an external drive with the FAT32 format, Time Machine indicates that the volume requires a reformat:

You cannot use fat32; if you select a fat32 external hard disk, the time machine will prompt you to format the disk.

 

NOTE: Time Machine does not offer to reformat other incompatible disk formats such as Mac OS Standard and NTFS. Use Disk Utility
To reformat those disks to a compatible format.

 

Note: The time machine does not provide formatting for mac OS standard and ntfs. If you need to format the two formats, use the disk tool.