The ongoing saga of integrating MacBook and external hard drive...

Small external USB drives.

Paul

^ ^ ^ ^ I'm with Paul on this. I've got several portable 500gig external usb-powered drives, (one for timemachine backup of my internal drive, the others for video and photo storage/archiving) and they're small and fit into any pocket on a computer backpack or briefcase. And, they've gotten so inexpensive that I just buy them in pairs -- one duplicates the other for backup. I do wish I could get a 1Tb portable drive, but that day will come.

I have about 20k images in all and here's the solution I worked out.

For archival, everything is in an iPhoto library on an external hard disk.

For mobile use, I have both an iPhoto library, and an aperture library for off loading purposes. Generally any serious shooting goes straight into aperture, less serious stuff (like iPhone images) goes into iPhoto.

When I'm out where ever I am, I usually go through and delete blurry or duplicate shots.

When I arrive home I transfer both libraries into their respective counterparts on my desktop machine (or in your case, your library on the external disk) for final processing. There is a library merging tool in both as well as the ability to export aperture to iPhoto.

Generally one I am done RAW processing in Aperture, the final series of images get put into iPhoto and the unprocessed images are kept in Aperture until I need them.

DON'T FORGET THE POWER OF THE DRAG AND DROP.

Got a $100 Apple gift card from a very good friend and for another $100 I just bought the 1TB Iomega drive on apple's site. The size and FW800 were what made it worth it for me.

pdxflint said:

^ ^ ^ ^ I'm with Paul on this. I've got several portable 500gig external usb-powered drives, (one for timemachine backup of my internal drive, the others for video and photo storage/archiving) and they're small and fit into any pocket on a computer backpack or briefcase. And, they've gotten so inexpensive that I just buy them in pairs -- one duplicates the other for backup. I do wish I could get a 1Tb portable drive, but that day will come.

Click to expand...

Do you need to take your entire photo library with you the whole time? If not, solution solved. If so, you'll have to make do with an external until 2tb SSDs come out.

Are there any good portable hard drives for Mac that you do not have to reformat (WD Passport)?

jsf8x said:

Are there any good portable hard drives for Mac that you do not have to reformat (WD Passport)?

Click to expand...

I guess you could look for one already formatted, but honestly, formatting into MacOS Extended (journaled) via Disk Utility is so easy that you should buy based on whatever is cheaper. if you see a WD Passport on sale and the exact same drive which has been formatted for Mac which is not on sale, why buy the more expensive one? Also, most drives come with some kind of utilities or backup software pre-installed on them which you'll likely not want to use anyway. If you want to save it, just copy that stuff to some archival folder, and then re-format your drive and name it anything you want.

pdxflint said:

I do wish I could get a 1Tb portable drive, but that day will come.

Click to expand...

The last Seagate GoFlex I got was 1TB.

Paul

Costco is selling the Seagate 2TB GoFlex for $99. I am considering buying it as I just purchased my very first computer, a Macbook Pro 15". Any reason I shouldn't buy 2TB for $99?

jsf8x said:

Are there any good portable hard drives for Mac that you do not have to reformat (WD Passport)?

Click to expand...

As stated, this is super easy with Disk Utility. I'm a 6 month veteran of Mac (recently saw the light). Anyways for Christmas I received a 1TB WD My Passport. Within 2 minutes of hooking the External drive to my MBP, I partitioned it to 2 drives (FAT--for sharing between Mac and Windows) & (Mac OSX Extended Journaled--for Time Machine backups).

Now, when I plug my new External into the USB, I get 2 drives...a shared drive, and a TM backup drive....super simple to do and now I only have to carry 1 external drive for all my needs.

By the way, to the posted talking about getting a 1TB when the prices come down. Mine cost $87 through BB on black friday. Keep your eyes peeled, the prices are dropping on this size.

Cosmo

E.Rye said:

Costco is selling the Seagate 2TB GoFlex for $99. I am considering buying it as I just purchased my very first computer, a Macbook Pro 15". Any reason I shouldn't buy 2TB for $99?

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Portability is an issue, the GoFlex Ultra-portables are up to 1.5T, but they'll fit in a laptop case, the full-sized drives are a pain to carry around. You pay a premium for the smaller drives, but it's worth it IMO for a portable. Costco has the 1.5T Ultra-portable GoFlex for under $150.

Paul

Paul, I've really liked my Seagate FreeAgent Go 500gig drives for their small size and ultra-slim design. Are the GoFlex Ultraportables notebook sized drives in external enclosures (meaning small, usb bus powered?) If so, I'll take the plunge. I guess I could quit being lazy and go to Newegg.com and check out what they've got...

pdxflint said:

Paul, I've really liked my Seagate FreeAgent Go 500gig drives for their small size and ultra-slim design. Are the GoFlex Ultraportables notebook sized drives in external enclosures (meaning small, usb bus powered?) If so, I'll take the plunge. I guess I could quit being lazy and go to Newegg.com and check out what they've got...

Click to expand...

The GoFlex Ultras are the small notebook-sized drives with a "smart" USB->SATA cable included. They're USB bus powered and so far mine have held up very well. They started the new line a while back and have from 320G to 1.5T. I just got the 1.5T a couple of weeks ago to move some portable files around and so far I'm happy with it- it freed up a drive to become a backup bootable external and took all my files.

Paul