Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Partition question for my external drive.

EarthDawn

EarthDawn

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 18, 2008
883
10
Long-eye Land, NY
OK so I put in an SSD and have my original 250gb drive in an external case. I want to use it for time machine and backing up my photos.

My question is how many partitions should I use and how much space should I allocate?

Also since the external drive will not be hooked up all the time how will that affect time machine?

I want to set it up but do it right the first time.

A few questions I know and some are very general... but any in-site will be greatly appreciated.
 
D. Not enough info.

How big is the SSD?
Where are the photos? Are the Photos on the SSD/Main Disk?
Will you want to use the external disk for storage at all?
Do you want your external drive to be bootable?
How far back do you want time machine to go?
 
Eddyisgreat said:
D. Not enough info.

How big is the SSD?
Where are the photos? Are the Photos on the SSD/Main Disk?
Will you want to use the external disk for storage at all?
Do you want your external drive to be bootable?
How far back do you want time machine to go?
Click to expand...

internal SSD is 40gb, external drive is 250gb

Photos are not loaded yet as it is a brand new machine for me. iMac is the main machine in the house.

I would like space on the external to store any home movies I edit. I would like to keep a copy of the final and raw movie on the external and then keep just a copy of the final product on my MacBook Pro. As well I would like to do the same with photos. Music and movies will not be used on this machine.

Not sure what it means to have the drive bootable...sorry for the novice answer.

I think 2 months is more then enough for backups on this.

Thank you ...
 
Based on my experience (mb = 1000 kb) :

Option A (^ protection , v space): 40/80/130
40 Gb partition for a nightly backup of your drive in its entirety that you can also boot from incase your system experiences a catastrophic problem. Use CarbonCopyCloner for this.
80 Gb for Time machine. The length of time you'll be able to go back depends on the volume of change your drive experiences though if it's just docs and stuff then you should have a pretty decent amount of time (you know how time machine works, right?)
130 Gb for your photos/videos.
------------------------------------------
Option B (v Protection, ^ Space): 80/210
80 Gb For time machine, benefits as described above.
210 Gb for photos/videos.

40 Gb for OS + apps doesn't give you much to store photos so I assume you'll keep those on your external as well. These files are at risk. Is a duplicate kept on the iMac? If so, i'll exclude those. If not, I can't in good conscience call this a complete solution where only a master (one copy) exist.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back