External hard drive question..

[BarbaRosa]

I just got a 1Tb external hard drive for my iMac. I'm wondering if I couldn't format this with two partitions. As the hard drive in my mac is 500G I don"t need any more for my back up, right? So would there be any problem with one 5000G partition for back up and another for music, pictures and what not?

Thanks:toast:

[struggle4progress]

1. What kind of back up are you doing?

If you've got an iMac that supports Leopard or Snow Leopard, and you're using Time Machine to backup, you probably want the whole drive, unpartitioned, since TM does incremental backups and will need more space than the 500mb drive you're backing up

If you're just cloning your 500mb drive regularly, I think you could do that on a 500mb partitiobn

[ROFF]

4. Back up hard drives are great

and I agree with what was said up thread. You may also want to consider thumb drives or flash memory sticks. I use them for music, photos, documents, bookmarks, contact lists, Keychains and other volatile stuff.

They have the added benefit of being easily transportable for off site storage. I do this type of backup regularly and store the stick away from home.

[Stinky The Clown]

2. Yes, you can partition and successfully back up, too.

Time Machine does an initial full back-up that is the size of all the data on your Mac. Then it does incremental backups. When it fills whatever space is available, it simply overwrites the oldest backup. On the flip side, if you give it a bazillion terabyte drive, it would fill the whole thing. It is actually a very flexible system.

I have a 320Gb and three 1Tb internal drives in my Mac Pro and one external 1Tb drive.

I do several types of backups. I have a cloning program that clones my main drive (1Tb) to the external drive every day at 4 AM. The external is then cloned to the internal 320 every day at 5 AM. I also run Time Machine to one of the internal !Tb drives. This gives me the possibility of booting from any one of three different drives, with the added ability to boot "my computer" on any other Mac by hooking the external drive to any machine I wish. For me, the redundancy is vital as I cannot afford a down day.

I use the second partition on the external drive to store movies and as a Time Machine place for my MacBook.

[BarbaRosa]

3. Thanks Stinky

While it took me a bit to grasp what you presented -I'm not that puter involved- you gave me a bunch to think about, I like the idea about two+ backup schemes, now that I have the room.

Off I go..