external hdd and backing up

[russed]

hi, well i have got myself a nice 160gb lacie d2 esternal hard drive. i want to back up all of my hardrive on my powerbook (40gb about 10gb left on it). basically, how should i go about it. i have a copy of silverkeeper that i got with it and also a copy of carbon copy cloner.

should i create a partition? if so how big?

what should i use to back it up? any other programme?

should i create my back up to be bootable? if so how?

anything else you may want to add!

thanks!

 

[russed]

anyone....please?!

 

[DrBoar]

First things first
How important is the backup and how often do you need to update the backup? If you work on a thesis or have data that can not be replaced it is good to be paranoid and backup every day. But if all you lose is some mp3 or maps in Unreal Tournament then a backup a month is perhaps good enough.


If you do 5 x32GB partitions you can do 5 different bootable backups with CCC. (to have older versions also include files deleted later by misstake etc)

I would just do have one partition and use CCC to backup once in while and trust myself to not delete important files.

With something like Retrospect you can do backup and then increments, that is more professional way of doing it.

One of the main points of an external drive is to have it really external that is of site. If your computer goes up in flames and the backup is next to it, it defeats the purpose

 

[russed]

well basically i just really want to back up music, movies, work etc all the usual stuff and nothing in particular. so i'm sure one a week would be enough. though maybe if im doing some more important work i could do it more often.

so what programme would you advise to use? what size of partition(s)? and what way would you back it up? just copy the files or make it so that the back up is bootable.