Backup to a Fat32 External Hard Drive

[kmann]

Hey Everyone,

I just bought a 400GB external drive and I'm looking to backup my macbook to it. The thing is it needs to have a Fat32 partition so I can back up my windows pc to it also. Is it possible to have a mac partition and a fat32 partition on one drive?

Anyone have any recommendations for this? I was going to use superduper as I had read a bunch of good things, but superduper won't work on a fat32 partition because of the 4gb file size limit.

Thanks,
Kevin

 

[Mr.Texor]

you can definately create 2 partitions on a single external drive..

I like rsync (or rsyncx) for back up purposes..
assuming you name your external partition "Backup", then you can run something like this on the terminal:

rsync -vax --delete --exclude .DS_Store /Users/your_user_name /Volumes/Backup

will do an incremental back up everytime.. the "-vax" part uses 3 options. the first one (the "v") tells rsync to increase verbosity on rsync's output. That way you can see what it did with extreme details (what it deleted or updated). the "a" means a lot of things , but it can be described as "archive mode." and the x means to not cross filesystems.. just use it

then you have a --delete option. This will delete files from your target (backup folder) that were deleted by you from your home folder.

then I put a "--exclude .DS_Store" so that rsync ignores those files as, I dont know why, they have always given me problems with back ups.

then.. you have the "/Users/your_user_name" part that will tell rsync what to back up.. and then you have the "/Volumes/Backup" part that tells rsync where to back up to..

to back up your windows folder from mac, just change "/Users/your_user_name" part with the path to your "My documents" folder.