Increasing my APFS partition on mac

By Ramy, 6 December, 2023

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hello my friends:
I have a 1 TB hard drive that am using for my time machine, i got time machine for my mac studio and laptop on the same HD.
I devided my 1 TB into 500 GB for each partition in order to put my time machine for each machine on separate Partition.
but i need more space for my Mac studio backup, so, what can i do?
i can take space from my laptop backup place, in order to inscrease my Backup place for my Mac studio, but how can i do this?
Thanks in advance

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Comments

By William Garcia on Tuesday, December 26, 2023 - 21:37

First things first, make sure to back up your important data. Then, open Disk Utility (you'll find it in the Utilities folder within Applications). Here, you can select your laptop backup partition and click 'Partition'. You'll see a pie chart where you can shrink this partition by dragging. Once you've freed up some space, do the same for your Mac Studio partition, but instead of shrinking, increase its size. After adjusting, hit 'Apply' and Disk Utility will resize the partitions without losing any data. Just a heads up, try not to resize too often as it can lead to fragmented disk space.

By Levi Gobin on Tuesday, December 26, 2023 - 21:37

One thing you could do is create an APFS volume rather than partitioning your disc.
What I would do is delete that partition with the backups on it (after putting them in a safe location). In disc utility, find your main ssd, and navigate below it to container disk then a number. For me, that's Container disk3. VO-shift-m, then add new APFS volume.
This allows your macOS and backup disc to share the same amount of space.
For example, if you have 300GB of backup stuff, your mac can use 700GB. Then, if you delete 150GB of that, your macOS will now have 850GB available for it to use.
Under the size options, you can select things like the max size, or the minimum size. This is super useful when trying to test out multiple versions of macOS.
Just to show you what you can do with APFS volumes, I at one point had 3 versions of macOS on this drive, which you absolutely can not do with partitions.

If you need any more help, please don't hesitate to ask me.
Alternatively, go here:
https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/add-delete-or-erase-apfs-volumes-dskua9e6a110/mac
Hope this helps.