storing photos on external drive and Time machine

Okay here is my situation. I just got a WD 4T External Drive. lots of room. I have set up Lightroom to save a copy of imports to my hard drive and my external drive. Now I want to back up my computer with Time machine on my external Hard Drive. I have never used it but will there be any conflict with the two? Or should I make a 2nd partition for the Time machine so it doesn't interfere with my saved photos. Thak you for your time. Michael

I can't help with computer tech. But, I recently had an external drive go and tech support was not successful in getting it up and running nor even erasing it so I could use it. Fortunately I had everything backed up on a second external drive. On the advice of my son I started one of the cloud type back up systems (BackBlast) @ $50/year which will back up both my computer and external drives while operating in the background. May be something you should consider as well.

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My recommendation is to get two dedicated Time Machine disks, in addition to the drive you have. Time Machine can backup to multiple disks. Then keep one at an offsite location, such as a relative's house or bank safe deposit box. Swap them every week or month depending on how much you are willing to lose. Because of the swapping I don't store data on the Time Machine disk, but if you choose to only keep one backup you can do this on a separate partition.

If you do it my way you won't need to have LightRoom create two copies, which I find to be very confusing, since TimeMachine will backup to a second and third disk.