Macintosh OS X 10.5's Time Machine automated backup program is worth consideration. However, if you're using a laptop and are constantly on the go, plugging in an external backup drive to launch the backup process somewhat interferes with the whole "set it and forget it" approach. Fortunately, there's a way to circumvent the need for an external hard drive: Use your existing hard drive for the backups.

This will, of course, require a little creativity on our part.

What we need is to split our existing Mac disk drive into two partitions (or "Volumes). One will be for our regular use while the other will be used for the Time Machine backups. However, we don't want to loose our existing data. That's where Apple's Boot Camp Assistant comes into play.

While Boot Camp Assistant is designed primarily as a solution to dual boot between OS X and Windows, we're going to use it's partitioning feature to take care of some of the work for us. Those familiar with the diskutil Terminal program might protest, as Boot Camp is essentially a "wrapper" to perform the same commands; while partially true, we're going to stick with the graphical interface that makes Boot Camp so attractive to the masses.

When you first launch Boot Camp Assistant from the Utilities folder, you'll receive the standard "Meet & Greet" introductory message:

You'll be given an option to resize your existing hard drive into two partitions ("Volumes"). You'll want to make sure that you provide enough size to back up your personal files several times over while leaving room for your main Macintosh operating system.

Once you've chosen a size, Boot Camp Assistant will diligently begin adjusting and formatting your hard drive. Your computer may appear unresponsive for a period of time, which is normal.

If you get the following error message:

One of four things might be causing some issues:

• You have too many open programs
• Your account has FileVault enabled
• Too many of your OS X system files reside on the parts of the disk that need to be moved
• The selected size of your new partition is too large to accomodate a dynamic partition resize

Regardless, you'll need to re-select a smaller size and try the process again.

Once finished, you'll receive the following message regarding the upcoming Windows Installation, which we will be avoiding:

And, indeed, on the desktop you should see your shiny new volume ready for use:

Since we're going to be using this volume to back up our files, we need to format it with something a little more friendly to the Mac OS X environment. Launch Disk Utility from the Utilities folder and re-format your new volume as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and give it a recognizable name. Here, we used the creative naming choice of, "Backup":

Now that your new Mac volume is properly formatted to handle OS X files (and associated resource forks), we need to configure Time Machine to use our new backup volume. Launch Time Machine from the Applications folder and click "Set Up Time Machine":

You'll be presented with the Time Machine preferences page, where you can accomplish quite a few things:

First, click "Change Disk" and select your shiny new backup volume:

You'll be provided with a warning message, which you can acknowledge to continue:

If you click "Options" from the Time Machine preferences panel, you'll be able to add folders to be excluded from the regular backup. This is important to do if you have a relatively small backup volume or if you have a large amount of files to back up. Given that the chances of filling up the backup drive are likely given the available size of most laptop hard drives, you'll probably want to uncheck the "Warn when old backups are deleted" item.

When you're done, don't forget to slide the switch from "Off" to "On" on the Time Machine preferences window. Once done, you'll see your new backup drive with the traditional Time Machine graphic in its place on your desktop:

Shortly thereafter, you'll see the initial Time Machine Backup dialog box indicating that the backup is being prepared.

You might receive the following error message:

If so, you'll either need to repeat the entire process to use a larger sized backup volume (complicated) or simply exclude more files. It's worth noting that if you are using a FileVault protected account, you'll need a large backup volume.

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