Need Advice On Backing Up

[dsnort]

I'm going to get an external hard drive to back up my two Macs, an iMac and a Macbook. I want to get a single external drive, big enough to handle both comps, and connect through my Extreme Base station. I had a few questions:

1. Can I back up both comps to the same drive? Maybe a partition for each?

2. Is it best to just back up certain files, or make a clone of the hard dive on the backup? And how do you clone a hard drive?( I've seen it mentioned, but don't know how to do it.)

Any help would be appreciated

 

[~J~]

I'm going to get an external hard drive to back up my two Macs, an iMac and a Macbook. I want to get a single external drive, big enough to handle both comps, and connect through my Extreme Base station. I had a few questions:

1. Can I back up both comps to the same drive? Maybe a partition for each?

2. Is it best to just back up certain files, or make a clone of the hard dive on the backup? And how do you clone a hard drive?( I've seen it mentioned, but don't know how to do it.)

Any help would be appreciated

1. Yes, you can back up 2 computers to the same drive, and a partition for each is exactly what I would recommend.

2. That depends on how much space you have. I prefer to back up EVERYTHING... that way if I ever screw something up with the OS, or lose a music file, or a document I created, I can restore and get it back.

One thing I would tell you to consider though... backing up can move large amounts of data (I routinely see backups in excess of 2GB, I backup my MBP at least every other day, sometimes more). I have seen a backup (excluding the initial) of ~38GB... doing that over a wireless connection could take HOURS. I use a FW400 drive, and would recommend that setup as well. I see transfer rates 400MB/min+ ...MUCH, MUCH faster. Just something to consider.

 

[flopticalcube]

Cloning the drive is the best especially the first time. You can use Superduper! or Carbon Copy Cloner, although even Disk Utility will copy a drive for you. Superduper! does the best job from what I can see. I have a FW400 MyBook drive that has separate partions for my OSX and Windows partitions on my main drive as well as partitions for several other machines (OSX and Windows).