backing up to ext. hdd with timemachine or.....?

[Meric]

hi there..

I have 2 seagate external hdds.. one has manual backups and my photos, mp3s etc... from my pc.. the other one is brand new empty...

this is my 1st mac.. so I was wondering what to use to back up... time machine? or the memeo ( comes with seagate ) or any other backup software..?

I want to use the harddrives in both pcs and macs.. mac reads my ntfs hdd but can't write it... ( I know there are some apps that can make the mac write on ntfs... )

also I wanna back up my windows xp under parallels....

thanks.

 

[Tomorrow]

I want to use the harddrives in both pcs and macs.. mac reads my ntfs hdd but can't write it... ( I know there are some apps that can make the mac write on ntfs... )

I don't think Time Machine plays well with NTFS, or being shared, for that matter. It does work well for backups, though.

 

[Meric]

I don't think Time Machine plays well with NTFS, or being shared, for that matter. It does work well for backups, though.

I wanna use the new drive as a backup PLUS keep a mirror of my files in the other drive...

 

[Tomorrow]

I wanna use the new drive as a backup PLUS keep a mirror of my files in the other drive...

My understanding of Time Machine is that it wants the whole drive to itself.

If you could use one drive for TM and the other as a mirror drive, that should work.

I don't know about the other backup program you mentioned, it might be willing to share a drive with other data, but I don't know if using NTFS to backup an OS X volume is the best idea - if you have to restore, you'd have to reinstall a utility onto OS X to use the NTFS drive and hope for the best.

 

[GGJstudios]

I don't think Time Machine plays well with NTFS, or being shared, for that matter

Time Machine only works with HFS+.

I wanna use the new drive as a backup PLUS keep a mirror of my files in the other drive...

My understanding of Time Machine is that it wants the whole drive to itself.

You can partition the drive and use one partition for Time Machine and the other for anything you like.


FAT32 (File Allocation Table)

• Read/Write FAT32 from both native Windows and native Mac OS X.
• Maximum file size: 4GB.
• Maximum volume size: 2TB

NTFS (Windows NT File System)

• Read/Write NTFS from native Windows.
• Read only NTFS from native Mac OS X
• To Read/Write/Format NTFS from Mac OS X: Install NTFS-3G for Mac OS X (free)
• Some have reported problems using Tuxera (approx 33USD).
• Native NTFS support can be enabled in Snow Leopard, but is not advisable, due to instability.
• Maximum file size: 16 TB
• Maximum volume size: 256TB

HFS+ (Hierarchical File System, a.k.a. Mac OS Extended)

• Read/Write HFS+ from native Mac OS X
• Required for Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner backups of Mac internal hard drive.
• To Read/Write HFS+ from Windows, Install MacDrive
• To Read HFS+ (but not Write) from Windows, Install HFSExplorer
• Maximum file size: 8EiB
• Maximum volume size: 8EiB

exFAT (FAT64)

• Supported in Mac OS X only in 10.6.5 or later.
• exFAT partitions created with OS X 10.6.5 are inaccessible from Windows 7
• Not all Windows versions support exFAT. See disadvantages.
• exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table)
• Maximum file size: 16 EiB
• Maximum volume size: 64 ZiB