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External Backup HD

Abulia

Abulia

macrumors 68000
Original poster
I'm looking at an external backup HD for my PM. I have a 300 GB internal drive so need a 250~300 GB external drive.

Mostly I'm interested in the Seagate or the Maxtor One Touch II as I don't need anything super-duper. My largest concern is it "just working" with the backup software in OS X, so perhaps it is the software -- not the hardware -- that is my primary selling feature.

In any case, does anyone have any experience with either of these products or similar ones?

Thanks!
 
The Maxtor OneTouch are supposed to be good. So are the LaCie drives.

What you do is connect the drive, download some software called Carbon Copy Cloner, (free on the internet) and then "clone" your hard drive to that external disk.

Make sure to repair permissions before the cloning. And remember to clone to a disk you don't care about-- it just wipes out everything on it.
 
I use Carbon Copy Cloner and a OWC (Other World Computing) Firewire 400/USB2 enclosure. Works great.
 
i have a lacie d2 250GB connected via fw800 to my 15"PB, 1,5 GHz.
i run 10.3.8.

i can't get Backup 2.02 to work. after backing up about 1GB it quits and leaves an unusabble file on the external HD.

now i back up my home folder every now and then with silver keeper that came free with the HD. it's not a real backup software. it just copies everything to the hd but is quite o.k.

andi
 
yellow said:
I hate Maxtor drives. Pieces of crap all.. I do like Seagate drives though..
Click to expand...
Hmmm ... I have 2 Maxtor 250 GB drives in my G5. they've been running 24x7 without problems. Actually, I can't remember having problems with any modern disk drive.
 
daveL said:
Hmmm ... I have 2 Maxtor 250 GB drives in my G5. they've been running 24x7 without problems. Actually, I can't remember having problems with any modern disk drive.
Click to expand...

I've had a staggering amount of Maxtor, IBM, and Western Digital (the worst of the lot) fail on me. I don't know what your vocation is, but in mine, I've seen thousands of computers so might have come in contact with more hard drives..
 
just a question. do you need to make a partition for CCC? im not bothered with being able to boot off it really (though i suppose it could be useful). also can you access the files in it once its been cloned?
 
I recommend the LaCie d2 drives. They are very reliable, built like tanks, and aesthetically match the PMG5s. I have two LaCie drives and a LaCie DVD burner in a LaCie desk rack, and it all looks and works great. They come with SilverKeeper, a nice utility, and work great with Backup.

Quiet, too.
 
andiwm2003 said:
i can't get Backup 2.02 to work. after backing up about 1GB it quits and leaves an unusabble file on the external HD.
Click to expand...
Try moving the /Users/[youraccount]/Library/Preferences/Backup folder elsewhere, then start up Backup (which will create a new prefs folder).

That fixed the problem for me.
 
jsw said:
I recommend the LaCie d2 drives. They are very reliable, built like tanks, and aesthetically match the PMG5s. I have two LaCie drives and a LaCie DVD burner in a LaCie desk rack, and it all looks and works great. They come with SilverKeeper, a nice utility, and work great with Backup.

Quiet, too.
Click to expand...

yeh, i second that about the lacie d2's, they look nice and work well!
 
russed said:
just a question. do you need to make a partition for CCC? im not bothered with being able to boot off it really (though i suppose it could be useful). also can you access the files in it once its been cloned?
Click to expand...
CCC makes an exact copy, bootable if you want, of the target disk. You can also exclude whatever you like from the target disk (say that 120GB of movies). There isn't much sense to backing up your files to another partition on the same disk; you need another disk. CCC will also allow you to make a disk image of the target drive so you can burn it, if you want, but obviously you don't have as much space to work with on a DVD.
 
I ended up getting a LaCie d2 500 GB drive. The software that comes with it stinks, IMO. Right now I'm using CCC but will take a peek at SuperDuper as well.

Right now my intent is to to one key bootable backup and then individual images stored on the backup. SuperDuper sounds interesting because you can save different restore points; something I'm interested in.

Thank you for the feedback.
 
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