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I have a new WD 6TB Elements external HD.
I want to create three 2TB partitions.
I am currently running Catalina.
One of the partitions I wish to use as a Time Machine Backup.
What is the proper method to set it up with Disc Utility?
Thanks!
I looked at the WD 6TB Elements drive and it apparently comes factory-formatted as NTFS for Windows, which is not useful in your situation. I suggest as a first step that you reformat the entire drive as Mac OS Extended Journaled, GUID partition scheme, 1 partition. After doing that, set up the 3 individual partitions. Then format the 1st partition as APFS. That should get you where you want to be.
For technical & performance reasons, APFS is not really suitable for hard drives, but since you need to have the 1st partition be bootable you don't have a choice there. IMO, the other 2 partitions should not be APFS; keep them as MacOS Extended Journaled. TM will work perfectly fine on a MacOS Extended Journaled disk.
I looked at the WD 6TB Elements drive and it apparently comes factory-formatted as NTFS for Windows, which is not useful in your situation. I suggest as a first step that you reformat the entire drive as Mac OS Extended Journaled, GUID partition scheme, 1 partition. After doing that, set up the 3 individual partitions. Then format the 1st partition as APFS. That should get you where you want to be.
For technical & performance reasons, APFS is not really suitable for hard drives, but since you need to have the 1st partition be bootable you don't have a choice there. IMO, the other 2 partitions should not be APFS; keep them as MacOS Extended Journaled. TM will work perfectly fine on a MacOS Extended Journaled disk.
Thanks! Two volumes would be backups of other current volumes.
One partition I want bootable. Currently running Catalina, but moving towards upgrading to Big Sur.
I use Carbon Copy Cloner...
Thinking of making that new bootable with Time machine, as am thinking I need to do clean install and getting rid of older system files that have been backed up since 2008 as I have upgraded OS.
Not sure what that looks like yet..
The ext. drive is currently formatted GUID
The first partition should be your bootable partition. It will need to be formatted as APFS for Catalina (as well as for Big Sur & future versions of macOS). Beyond that, Apple would argue that you don't need three partitions, just a single APFS partition containing two APFS Data Volumes.
However ... since you are using a hard drive (not an SSD), I'd go with 3 traditional partitions. Format the first partition as APFS so it's bootable; format the second & third partitions as MacOS Extended Journaled for your backups (non-bootable).
(Note that GUID is the partition scheme for the entire hard drive, it's not a disk format. APFS & MacOS Extended Journaled are formats you would apply to individual partitions.)
Well, for starters, what is your intended use of each partition and what format(s) do you intend to use? (Bootable, not bootable, Catalina, other macOS, Windows, data, TM, etc.)
6 TB External 3 volume partitioning
