Number of partitions in your external hard drive

[woodwindow376]

Hi everyone,

I am planning on buying an external hard drive to back up files and probably use for Time machine for 2 MBPs in my house (mine and my wife). I think 1 TB is fine (plus the fact that it fits my budget).

Question on you gurus, did you partition your hard drive? and if yes, how many partitions and what are the they for?

I am thinking of having 3 partitions. first is for a time machine for 2 MBPs (maybe 300GB or is this too large?), 2nd partition is for the Personal and Media Files (600GB, this includes my itunes), and probably the last partition will be 'EXTRA' which will be used whenever i want to get some files from my work pc or a friend's pc (basically the day to day activity in which you need a portable drive), alloted space: 100gb or what will be left on the 1TB as I know i will only get 900+ GB space even if it is advertised as a 1 TB drive.

Just want to know how other people do it.

Thanks in advance!

 

[waw74]

for time machine they recommend twice the size of the drive you're backing up. due to the way time machine operates, you will have multiple copies of the same file, if it's something that changes frequently.
although if you want, you could go by the amount of the drive you are using instead of the full drive, you'd probably want to add a bit to that though.

partitioning off for time machine is a good plan, that way the backups don't take over your entire drive.
partitioning for the other parts, maybe not. you can accomplish the same thing via folders, and if you need more room, folders resize a lot easier than partitions do. normally partitions are deleted when you try to resize them.

unless you want different drive formats, then partitioning is the way to go. The only reason you would need to do this is if you're dealing with both PCs and Macs and have files that are over 4GB.