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external hard drive size

A

alecthemacboi96

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 26, 2010
15
0
hello everyone i have a question about the capacity of an external hard drive

i just got a macbook pro (its awsome) and need to do a backup using time machine. i have a 250 gb hard drive but i wont be able to fill it up but still have to do a backup because im going to use it for school.

my question is whats a good brand for external hard and does it have to be more than my computers hard drive or can it be the same. (250 hard drive and 250 external hard drive)
 
alecthemacboi96 said:
hello everyone i have a question about the capacity of an external hard drive

i just got a macbook pro (its awsome) and need to do a backup using time machine. i have a 250 gb hard drive but i wont be able to fill it up but still have to do a backup because im going to use it for school.

my question is whats a good brand for external hard and does it have to be more than my computers hard drive or can it be the same. (250 hard drive and 250 external hard drive)
Click to expand...

It doesn't matter what size it is. If you get a larger drive, you can partition part of it for backups and part for other uses.

Two of the ones I use:

OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro™
owcmeaqmaphero350.jpg


OWC Mercury On-The-Go Pro
main_otg_pic2.jpg
 
Depends on is it solely for backup purposes or are you going to use it as storage too. If it's just for backups, you could just get a 320GB 2.5" bus-powered drive, for example LaCie Rugged or WD My Passport.
 
If your using it for storage, you can't go to big. I just got a 2TB external and only have a 320GB internal. No harm in having more than you will need.
 
well i will be mostly using it for backup of my hard drive and probably nothing else. so would i need a 320 gb external hard drive or get a 250 instead. oh buy the way is iomega a good brand because future shop has a iomega prestige on sale.
 
alecthemacboi96 said:
well i will be mostly using it for backup of my hard drive and probably nothing else. so would i need a 320 gb external hard drive or get a 250 instead. oh buy the way is iomega a good brand because future shop has a iomega prestige on sale.
Click to expand...

Iomega is decent. How much is the price difference between 250GB and 320GB?
 
I'd recommend to buy a disc in the 750GB range and make two partitions on it.

The first one (250GB, so the exact size for your boot drive) will then be used for a bootable backup via CCC (SuperDuper does the job as well, I prefer CCC though), the second one can be used as a TimeMachine backup for accessing older files or files that have been deleted by mistake.
 
ya true its better to get the 320 and which is a better brand iomega, seagate or western digital
 
apple recommends twice the size of your hard drive for time machine. as time machine is not just a snapshot of your drive, but backups of the changes too.

What it does is make a full backup when you start, in an hour it will backup the files that have changed since the last one, and so on. then as the drive starts to fill up it will get rid of older backups.
Time Machine saves the hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month.
Click to expand...
 
i ended up getting the seagate free agent go flex 320 gb i hope its good, does anyone have experience with this drive. i will be using time machine with it but it wont be plugged in regularly maybe once every month or so
 
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