Is this an external drive limitation?

[skiff]

I use a Fantom 80GB external drive on which I've loaded a bootable backup of my hard drive. It works great and I'm happy to have it. But I'm not even beginning to use up all 80GB capacity, can't I enter more data on this drive without disturbing my bootable backup? I've been led to believe that anything I add will copy over what's already on the drive.

I can't get definitive information at the Fantom web site. I'm sure one of our forum guys will be competent to answer my question. Right?

 

[rlove06]

I use a Fantom 80GB external drive on which I've loaded a bootable backup of my hard drive. It works great and I'm happy to have it. But I'm not even beginning to use up all 80GB capacity, can't I enter more data on this drive without disturbing my bootable backup? I've been led to believe that anything I add will copy over what's already on the drive.

I can't get definitive information at the Fantom web site. I'm sure one of our forum guys will be competent to answer my question. Right?

As long as you don't screw with the file structure of the OS. Yeah, why not. Just be like adding files to the root directory of your current OS HD.

 

[PlaceofDis]

or you could reformat it, and partition it.

leaving however much space you need for backup available and the rest for file storage.

 

[hayduke]

I would partition it as was already mentioned. You can do this with Disk Utility. Make one partition that is the size of the drive you are backing up and leave the remainder in the second partition. I'm pretty sure you can boot just fine from a partitioned Firewire drive.

 

[Makosuke]

I'm pretty sure you can boot just fine from a partitioned Firewire drive.

You definitely can; this is exactly how I do my backups, and it's served me well. I always have the backup partition of identical size as my boot partition, so I won't end up wasting any space or having to repartition the backup drive when my boot partition gets more stuff on it.

Besides, even if you couldn't boot from the backup for some strange reason, you'd still be able to clone the backup back over one way or another.