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i'm college bound this september! so i need help! yay! (back up advice)

iamrawr

iamrawr

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 16, 2010
263
0
New Jersey
what is a good size in GB for a portable hard drive that's efficient enough to use as a back up for time machine? 500gb? less? any good brands to recommend in terms of portability, firewire800/hi-speed USB compatibility, and durability?
price doesn't matter but the lower the better :p

oh and another thing... i'm fairly new to macs because i've never owned a notebook but i've been doing alot of research about them and worked on them too (computer graphics adobe photoshop elective).
so i'm interested in how apple presents their student promos, what they (can) offer, and when so that i can get all my stuff ready before i go to college.

thanks :D
 
The size of your backup drive depends on your internal hard drive. I would think 1TB should be more than adequate, as would USB.
 
you can never have too much space. It depends on your budget and what you are going to be putting on the hard drive.

I have a 250 and a 320. I have never filled up either so im saying a 500 would be good, but if you can get a good deal on a 1tb i would go with that.
 
I'm in the same boat and going for the DIY solution- getting the base macbook pro, popping in a 500 GB drive, and using the standard 250 GB for storage in an external backup drive. I figure by the time I fill up the external, SSDs will be a reasonable option and I can pop one in, use the 250 for storage, and the 500 for backup, or something like that.
 
My experience from college/Uni is that you seem to *ahem acquire films over time, and a bigger hard drive is rather useful.
 
thanks for all the advice. i'll take each of them into consideration =]

a few tweeks to my question:
i'm looking for a firewire connection because i will need the USB. a shame that the macbook pro 15" still has only 2 USB. im coming from a 2006 17" XPS with 6 usb ports.

also, i'm deciding on getting a 500gb i5 macbook pro 15". would a 640gb be good enough? under $150 is around how much i'm willing to pay now. the external drive will be used 90% for back up purposes, so i've planned so far.
 
I try to do 1.5x the size of the drive you want to backup. So for your 500gb internal drive, I wouldn't touch something smaller than 640gb, but it doesn't have to be much larger.

Also, as another poster mentioned, you do acquire many large files while living in the dorms. I'd be prepared for that with another hard drive for them.
 
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