Backup questions

[Old Sniffer]

I have a Lacie external firewire 500GB hard drive that I've partitioned into three segments. 1. (80GB) for Powerbook backup; 2. (200gb) for Video & 3. remainder for music & photos.

Q1. I've recently acquired a mac mini and want to add a partition onto the drive to backup the mini. Can I re-partition / resize the Video or Music segment's to create the 4th partition? How easy is it to do this?

Q2. Have been using an unregistered copy of Super Duper (Ver 2.0.1). Am generally happy with it as a backup programme, but is this the best software backup to organise and structure 4 backups? What are the benefits of the upgraded version (& registered copy)?

Q3. Have been using ISync for syncing mobile phone contacts but want to sync a Sony Clie (NX70 model, with a bluetooth antenna). Tried, but failed to get Bluetooth to work. Would like to sync with ICal - has anyone tried with this model?

Q4. How do I backup my DV tapes directly from my Camcorder to the Hard Drive? Is this possible without having to use IMovie?

Q5. I had a trial of .Mac and liked it for the syncing of contacts, calendar, bookmarks etc. across my two macs, but did not feel I would use other features of .Mac and therefore did not take out a membership. Is there any other way to sync across Macs?


Apologies for the amount of Q's (If they've already been answered elsewhere, happy with a link)

Thanks.

 

[Makosuke]

I'll try a couple:

Q1: No. There aren't any "live repartitioners" that I'm aware of for the Mac/HFS+. I have a similar setup, but I just have one partition roughly the size of my boot partition for a direct mirror, then the rest of the drive for media files. Regardless, if you wanted a boot partition mirror for the Mini as well, you're going to have to repartition the whole thing to create it.

Q4: There might be an app to write a DV stream directly to disk, but iMovie and QT Pro are the only ones I'm aware of. I generally use iMove, but if you have a QT Pro key, you can I believe set the video input to save in device native format, which basically lets you hit play and stream to the hard drive. Haven't tried this, admittedly, but it should work.

Q5: It is possible to sort of hack together a .Mac account using other tools, but it's a bit involved. Have a look on Google for some tutorials.

 

[yellow]

Q1: No. There aren't any "live repartitioners" that I'm aware of for the Mac/HFS+.

Actually there are 2..
However, personally I wouldn't ever use them because I'm paranoid.
Any applications that ****s with my partition map on the fly is not to be trusted.. IMO.

That being said, I'm sure plenty of people have used it safely and successfully. As I said, I'm paranoid. So, caveat emptor:

iPartition
VolumeWorks

Q2: Their website details the pluses to paying. RTM. Incremental backups are a very nice componant to the paid-for version. It saves a lot of time on backing up. And, there's the whole, pay for what you use philosophy. SuperDuper! I'm sure wasn't easy to code, and it's nice to encourage good developers to keep going.

 

[Old Sniffer]

Thanks, Yellow & Makosuke for your suggestions.