Does Time Machine use an entire drive, or can you partition a drive and use one partition for Time Machine and another for whatever else you want. I have a couple of NAS's setup and would like to set one of them up for Time Machine for my gf's laptop, but also keep half or whatever size I make the partition for manually storing stuff.

 

On my Synology I was able to specify a size. I forget if I actually gave it a different partition or if I just told the Time Machine server on the Synology how much it could use.

 

Does that mean you can use the rest of the drive space to do as you wish?

 

yes.

FWIW, my Synology required a software update to support Lion.

 

Yes, you can partition drives as you choose.

 

Great. Thanks guys.