Partioning External FW 800 - Time Machine and Bootdrive?

[hoxley]

Hi hope someone can advise.

I am looking at external firewire 800 drives.

Can I partition the external into two volumes and do the following?

One volume will be used as a Cloned Boot Drive of an older macbook.
The other volume with be used as a Time Machine Backup of new Macbook.

If the above does work, is it possible to have a setup (disk space allowing) where the Time Machine Back includes the mounted volume of the cloned boot drive?

I assume (perhaps wrongly) that time machine can backup mounted volumes such as another external drive.

I have been looking at the Imoga Max Mini and Ultra Max.
If anyone has any experience of these, or any suggestions for other externals feel free to add your experiences / recommendations.

eSata might be useful, but then that all depends on how quickly thunderbolt adapators/hubs come out - and wether these come out before consumer thunderbolt drives.

Thanks.

 

[MacForScience]

Hi hope someone can advise.

I am looking at external firewire 800 drives.

Can I partition the external into two volumes and do the following?

One volume will be used as a Cloned Boot Drive of an older macbook.
The other volume with be used as a Time Machine Backup of new Macbook.

If the above does work, is it possible to have a setup (disk space allowing) where the Time Machine Back includes the mounted volume of the cloned boot drive?

I assume (perhaps wrongly) that time machine can backup mounted volumes such as another external drive.

I have been looking at the Imoga Max Mini and Ultra Max.
If anyone has any experience of these, or any suggestions for other externals feel free to add your experiences / recommendations.

eSata might be useful, but then that all depends on how quickly thunderbolt adapators/hubs come out - and wether these come out before consumer thunderbolt drives.

Thanks.

What computer are you using (How does thunderbolt or eSata have anything to do with this)?

As far as advice on the part that makes some sense here:
1.) Avoid at all costs Iomega

2.) Consider: Western Digital, Lacie, and G-Tech

3.) Buy a RAID 1 which will give you the redundancy you want. Partition the drive and clone the internal volume and run time machine on the rest of the drive.

Cheers

 

[DanielCoffey]

Yes, you can partition the external and have TM in one partition and the clone on the other but remember if the external HDD fails, you will lose both backups at the same time.

I assume you are considering moving it from one machine to the other and letting it back up whichever one it is connected to? You may need to split it into three partitions however, one to TM your main machine, one for the clone and one to TM your secondary machine.

I am sure someone who has tried this will verify either way.