OSX 10.2.8 to tiger upgrade question(newbie)

[BCS]

Have a g4 mirror dual 1 gig 80 gig hd. I've been using 10.2.8 and just got a new nano and 10.4 so I can use it. I have 3.5 gig left of my 80 gig and a perferated 300 gig internal broke into 200 and 100 gig. of the 200 I have 60 left and 100 of 100 on the other. So I want to upgrade and don't want to buy an external right now for backup. Can I use the 100 gig on the internal as a back up for my 80 gig before upgrading? If so how would you recommend I do so and would it be worth my time. I've read that I might want to do a disk repair permissions before and after I do the upgrade. Is that true, never did it before?
Thanks in advance. I'll figure this thing out eventually.

BCS

 

[Drewswa77]

Yes I would do a disk repair before and after. And I would use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up your 80gig. Its free and easy to use. Can take a while though so make sure you have time to let it do its thing.
But after that when you upgrade to 10.4 I would remove some stuff from your 80gig. With just 3.5 gigs left 10.4 will have trouble fitting on there and its never a good idea to run your computer off a nearly full drive. So I would take some files from the 80 gig and put them somewhere else.

 

[j26]

I gather you should keep 10% of the drive the os is on free (going from memory here, so I could be wrong), so you should try to get rid of at least 5 gigs.

 

[Xavier]

I run a very similar rig

I leave 5 GB on my OS drive (An 80 gb), and use the 200 for backups and everything else. Plenty of space, but you seem to be running out fast

 

[BCS]

Thanks All,
I moved stuff to my 300 internal. Got a 320 gig firewire external and cloned the 80 to it, repaired drives. Install went well, but safari is running slow and my emails are gone from mail. everyhing transfered but mac flac. Had to partition external into 125,125,45 since 10.2.8 only recognizes 128 gig drives.
If anyone knows about that safari or missing mail let met know.

LogJam