Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/ How to Use Extra Space on an APFS Time Machine Drive Adam Engst When buying a drive for Time Machine backups, it's always a good idea to get one that's larger than you expect you'll need'plan for the future! If you need to offload gigabytes of non-backup files from your internal drive, either temporarily or as a permanent archive, it's tempting to take advantage of that 4 TB sitting unused on your 8 TB Time Machine drive. By default, you can't use the free space on an APFS Time Machine drive for anything else. However, Apple says you can if you create an additional APFS volume on the disk. In an Eclectic Light Company post, [1]Howard Oakley refines Apple's advice to explain when you should create a new volume within the Time Machine APFS container and when you should instead create a separate APFS container. Remember that you still need to back up those extra files on the Time Machine drive in some other way! [2]Read original article References 1. https://eclecticlight.co/2022/05/20/how-to-make-more-use-of-your-backup-disk/ 2. https://eclecticlight.co/2022/05/20/how-to-make-more-use-of-your-backup-disk/ .