New external Hard drive set up

[mozz2020]

Hello,

I have just got a 1Tb external HD which I would like to use with time machine.

I currently have a 320Gb internal for all my applications- mainly for audio purposes. I record directly onto this.

I also have a 320Gb external for all my music, video, pictures and archived files. This is at about 70% capacity. My internal drive is only using about 100Gb for my OS and apps.

I would like to set up the 1Tb as a back boot drive and a time machine back up for both hard drives.

If I partition this, how much space do I need to leave for a boot drive and how would I go about this?

thanks for your help.

 

[BobZune]

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/partitioning_tiger.html has help on how to to the partitioning and formatting - note that you want the partition table (last picture) to be GUID if you have an Intel Mac and APM if you have an older PowerPC (PPC) Mac. Note th PPC Macs will boot only from (external) Firewire drives (not USB).

Two partitions on the external drive would be appropriate, both formatted to HFS+ (not case sensitive). One about 330 GB for a bootable clone, and the other the reminder of the 1 TB, for Time Machine.

Use CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper for cloning the internal drive on the 330 GB partition. Since this partition is larger than the internal drive, it should work fine even if you add material to the internal drive. Test it out for bootability (i.e., boot from it). When you do so, make sure you remember where you booted from. Verify it works, then reboot to the internal disk. You can clone the internal boot disk periodically to this partition.

Now you can set up the Time Machine to use the second bigger partition. The other external drive will be excluded, so go to the TM options and remove it from the exclude list (so it does get backed up). Make a note of the NAME of the external drive for future use (I have heard that the name as to be the same if you replace it and want TM to restore to it; thre may be workaround to this I am not aware of). Let TM do the back up (it will take a few hours). After it is done, enter the TM and check a few directories to verify both disks got backed up. You should be all set.