from pc to imac 20 inch concerns

[hulk100]

Im

thinking of getting an imac 20inch as currently have a standard pc world pc. I have read great things but I am confused after reading about external hard drives and back ups. I run a 1 tb usb external hard drive as my main storage and put everything on that and leave the pc hard drive pretty empty except for the operating system. Can you still do that on a mac as its seems from other threads that it clones your pc one. I store lots of films, music etc and dont want to have a mimic of the mac hard drive. Does mac have the ability like a pc to drag and drop to folders so external drive will just look like a folder. Sorry if this sounds a silly question but I have no experience with a mac yet

thanks

 

[OldGuyDave]

Im

thinking of getting an imac 20inch as currently have a standard pc world pc. I have read great things but I am confused after reading about external hard drives and back ups. I run a 1 tb usb external hard drive as my main storage and put everything on that and leave the pc hard drive pretty empty except for the operating system. Can you still do that on a mac as its seems from other threads that it clones your pc one. I store lots of films, music etc and dont want to have a mimic of the mac hard drive. Does mac have the ability like a pc to drag and drop to folders so external drive will just look like a folder. Sorry if this sounds a silly question but I have no experience with a mac yet
thanks

Well I suppose it depends on what *exactly* you want to do but basically you can do just about anything on a Mac what you can do on a PC. I'm a new switcher and am very pleased with my 20" Mac. My iTunes Library runs on an external harddrive and I have no problem.
Cheers

 

[uuaschbaer]

Hi hulk100,
It sounds like you read about Time Machine which is the mac operating system's back-up software. Using time machine is of course not obligatory and external harddisks that you connect don't automatically get affected for that purpose. I don't have a mac, however, so it would be helpful if someone were to confirm that.

 

[crazycat]

Im

thinking of getting an imac 20inch as currently have a standard pc world pc. I have read great things but I am confused after reading about external hard drives and back ups. I run a 1 tb usb external hard drive as my main storage and put everything on that and leave the pc hard drive pretty empty except for the operating system. Can you still do that on a mac as its seems from other threads that it clones your pc one. I store lots of films, music etc and dont want to have a mimic of the mac hard drive. Does mac have the ability like a pc to drag and drop to folders so external drive will just look like a folder. Sorry if this sounds a silly question but I have no experience with a mac yet

thanks

There are so silly questions, only silly answers.

Yes you can just drag files onto your hard drive as you would with a PC. When you buy a Mac there is an application called Time Machine, TM backs your hard drive for you but you dont have to use it.

If you have anymore questions post them right here and i will try to answer you as soon as possible.

 

[dXTC]

By default, Mac OS X's Time Machine function backs up only the drive containing the OS onto an external partition (user's choice) when activated. However, the user can allow another external partition to be backed up by Time Machine as well; the allowed/excluded areas are shown in Time Machine Preferences.

This means that, if you get another external drive, you can use that to keep backups of both your Mac system drive and your 1TB data drive, which you can still dedicate to your main media storage. I'd get a 2 TB FireWire 800 drive; Time Machine will be able to store more backups that way, and FW800 is wicked fast.

Option 2 would be to repartition your current 1TB drive, and configure Time Machine to use the second partition. This would involve a bit of work and probably wouldn't be worth it if your 1TB drive is over half full.

Option 3 is not to use Time Machine at all, since your main storage is already separate from your system drive. I'd still use some sort of backup process for your data, though...