Partitioning ext. HDD

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[Slowpoke47]

Running Mint Mate 19.2 on two LAN computers.  Recently set up Veeam backups for one computer to a 1tb ext. disk using the excellent tutorial by Ascaris on this forum- several weekly backups completed, full and incremental, about 100GB used.  Disk shows 831GB free space.

Can I partition this disk without formatting and thereby deleting the contents?  I would like to use the same ext. disk to back up the other machine as well.  It wouldn’t be too onerous to start over, with two clean partitions, but either way, not familiar with the operation in Mint.

EDIT- looking at the GParted utility, seems like partitioning is doable but would like to hear from someone with some experience.

• This topic was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by Slowpoke47.

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Why don’t you just use two different folders, one for each machine. You can make subfolders for each individual backup. Or simply add the date to the image name when you create it and you can all the imabes for each machine in their own folder.

Example folder:PCA with PCAImage191231.img and PCAImage200101.img

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Ascaris, Slowpoke47

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Thank you- all I want to do is to have this disk act like two separate disks, which I think just means shrink the current partition, i.e. the whole disk, to create free space for a new partition.  I’m hoping the naming the new partition will allow the backup app to use the proper partition when one or the other computer is backing up.  Could be that if I can do this, directing the backups will be self-explanatory.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but with my history…

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Veeam is designed to handle this for you. Just point your backups at a parent folder (like \Veeambackups) and it’ll build out the folder structure from there when you add additional machines.

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Slowpoke47

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I would suggest going this way too.  That way, you only have one drive to worry about filling up instead of two!  I do all of my Veeam backups to the same drive for all my PCs (though I have multiple drives, I have backups for each PC on each drive, so I have more backups available if one drive were to fail).

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Slowpoke47

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+1 for this setup. I rotate several physical drives to the images (using Macrium Reflect Free) for my 5 machines and NAS. The directory on each looks like this:

HTH

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
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Slowpoke47

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jabeattyauditor wrote:

Veeam is designed to handle this for you. Just point your backups at a parent folder (like \Veeambackups) and it’ll build out the folder structure from there when you add additional machines.

So, just to beat this to death- starting with the single partition (entire drive), set up and in use for one machine using Veeam- when I set up Veeam in the second machine, I don’t have to add a new partition to the backup drive because the app will take care of it?

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Veeam creates its subfolders using the name of the backup job you supply. If you name your new backup job “My Second PC” you’ll see a new subfolder with that name containing your .vbm, .vbk, and .vib files. (Maybe some .vrb files if you do reverse incrementals.)

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Slowpoke47

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