External Hard Drive

[escapenet]

I got a 1TB external hard drive for backing up music/photos/documents and etc. Im wondering now, what to do next?

Should I partition the hard drive into 2? One half of the system for backup and the other half for extra storage. And how does the computer know where you want your information to go to?

Second, as of right now I only need a backup of my files, about once a week, seeing how my files do not change much. Should I use the Time Machine or Carbon Copy?

I also only want the hard drive to be plugged in only when i need it

 

[blodwyn]

I got a 1TB external hard drive for backing up music/photos/documents and etc. Im wondering now, what to do next?

Should I partition the hard drive into 2? One half of the system for backup and the other half for extra storage. And how does the computer know where you want your information to go to?

Second, as of right now I only need a backup of my files, about once a week, seeing how my files do not change much. Should I use the Time Machine or Carbon Copy?

I also only want the hard drive to be plugged in only when i need it

My suggestion would be to create 2 partitions on your external, the first partition equal in size to your Mac's internal hard disk, and the second taking up whatever space is left.

These partitions will both show up in Finder as separate volumes, as if you had plugged 2 drives in.

Use the first partition for a Carbon Copy clone of your internal disk, that way you have a bootable backup handy.

Use the second partition for additional storage, and optionally you could also use this for a Time Machine backup in addition to extra storage. You can safely share a partition between TM and other storage, however TM will tend to take up more and more space over time.

Bear in mind that any files you store in the second partition will not have any backup copies anywhere, so I would advise you not to store anything you aren't prepared to lose if the disk fails.

 

[escapenet]

would it be wise to create 3 partitions - one for carbon copy, one for TM and one for extra storage rather than letting TM take up the whole space

 

[old-wiz]

would it be wise to create 3 partitions - one for carbon copy, one for TM and one for extra storage rather than letting TM take up the whole space

I think 3 partitions would be a great idea; otherwise TM will eat up all the space. I use a similar scheme so that TM doesn't eat up the entire drive.

 

[escapenet]

how big should a TM partition be?

right now...one is going to be a 320 gb cloner of everything set to mac journal.

As of now my music is 25 GB, photos about 10GB plus any documents I would have