I just got a new EX485 home server. I have been using a 500GB external drive as my time machine back up drive for my mac. I am trying to decide if I should take that 500GB drive (it's a sata drive in a case) and add it to the home server as another drive.

I am assuming that if I make this drive part of the pool, it's going to format it and I will lose my existing backup and backup history. I don't think WHS can act as my time machine back up unless I assign space from the pool. Am I right in these assumptions?

Is there any advantage to having a drive on the server that is not part of the pool but just a drive? Just wondering.

Yes, if you add the drive to your whs it will wipe your existing backups. If you want your whs to act as your Time Machine backup point you need to install the Mac client and go through the setup, documented here in the forums or in your user manual, and make a Time Machine backup location on your server. The benefit of this versus an external drive is being able to backup through the network either wired or wirelessly. It is pretty sweet once you have it set up correctly. As for putting the drive in and not making it part of the storage pool I can't see any benefit for doing that. Someone else may want to comment more on that item. My theory is if I am putting it in the server I am either going to make it part of the storage pool or a server backup.

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Marc

EX475 - 5.5 TB Total - 3.5TB MSS w Rosewill RSV-S5(2TB Backup Pool)- LE-1640 (AMD X2 BE-2350 unstable) - 2GB Ram
2.5 Unofficial Software Update/Time Machine Backup
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24" iMac, 2 MacBook Pros
2 Apple TV's

I think it is a solvable problem. On your place I would do the following:
1. Keep the external drive untouched for a while
2. Setup MSS and install Mac connector
3. Using Mac Control Center create enough backup storage (or even some more) to hold current backup history from your external drive.
4. After connector mounts you Backup storage copy there everything from your external drive.
5. Reassign Time Machine to MSS backup storage and make sure that Time Machine accepts backup history
6. Add your external drive to MSS to extend pool.
7. Increase MSS backup storage for Mac using Mac connector (if needed).
Hope this helps.

That is interesting Bruder. Out of curiousity have you ever tried that? I was just curious because I had not heard of transferring old backups. That is awesome if it does work.

Once, but backup was without a history - just created. Time Machine's backup base is just a folder hierarchy with one root. Important thing (!!!) is to copy it on HFS+ - it won't work for sure if you copy it on SMB share, NTFS, etc.. Anyway for the topic-starter it worth trying, because till step 6 it is absolutely safe. If it won't work he just stay where he is (mac connector allows to delete created backup disk on server to free space). However it should - go brave , there is no risk until there is a backup history on the external disk.