How to best use Super Duper to back up several computers ?

[FrenchPB]

Guys,


I just bought a Western Digital 1To drive to back up my iMac, my girlfriend's MacBook, and my other external hardrive on which I put all my videos.

Since I already use Time Machine with an other smaller drive, I would like to use that new 1To drive to be my master bakcup system, with bootable disk image of the two computers. I bought SuperDuper to do all that, but I'm not quite sure how to best use it.

Basically, I'd like to do a total backup of the two computers once a month, as well as back up the files on m multimedia hard drive.

How should I do that ? Do I need to create three partitions on the new disk ? How do bootable images work ? How do you boot from an other computer with your superduper backup ? ...

I hope you can give me the best practice and advice on how to do that.

 

[FrenchPB]

Damn, when I formatted my brand new harddrive, I got an error at the end using disk utility. Does that mean the disk will never work ?

I am trying to reformat it again, but it takes 9 hours !!

 

[Matek]

If it takes 9 hours, you're doing something wrong. Did you enable any options that write zeros to the whole drive (erase empty data?) or anything like that? You shouldn't do it.

A proper quick format should be over in less than a minute and even a regular one shouldn't take more than half an hour.

 

[FrenchPB]

If it takes 9 hours, you're doing something wrong. Did you enable any options that write zeros to the whole drive (erase empty data?) or anything like that? You shouldn't do it.

A proper quick format should be over in less than a minute and even a regular one shouldn't take more than half an hour.

Yes, I'm writing zeros once to the whole disk, to check that it all works well. I've always done that when buying a new harddrive, probably not necessary

I will hec the disk wih disk warrior if it doesn't work after that.

Then, how should I use SuperDuper ? Do I need to create several partitions on it to backup several computers ?