Probably a stupid External HD question

[RHatton]

Hello all,

I am looking into buying an external drive to back up all of my data from my macbook onto. I was looking into buying a 1 TB and partitioning 500 GB to Time Machine and 500 GB to Super Duper to have a backup bootable drive since the new macbooks can boot using USB 2.0. My question is since both of these programs will be used to operate the HD. While the HD is plugged in can I still use it like a normal HD. What I mean buy this is can I still drag and drop my iphoto library onto the External and do the atypical things you do with the hard drive without using super duper or Time machine. Probably a dumb question but i thought I would ask since I'm new to the external storage game. Thanks for any help.

Ryan

 

[dukebound85]

yes

keep in mind that time machine just creates one folder on an external, thats it.

super duper, if it s anything like ccc will create all the folders as it looks on your star up disk

what i would do is use your super duper partition JUST for super duper

the time machine partiton, you can use it just as a hdd. put your photos, files, whatever on the same partition. no issues

edit: first is the ccc drive....notice all the folders
second is the time machine drive....notice tm only makes a folder and you can use it for whatever youd like in addition

 

[RHatton]

Awesome. Thank you for the info. I thought so but I wanted to check with you guys. Thanks again

-Ryan

 

[RHatton]

Reviving the thread I also have another question in reference to external HD's. When I buy my external HD and partition the drive for TM and Super Duper, if I buy a new computer in the next year or so and I want to transfer just my applications and personal media(documents, pictures, music etc.) would it be easier to do this using TM, Migration Assistant or the clone of my old HD in super duper? Also could I transfer just the applications from the old computer to a new one and leave the personal files on the external HD backed up without having to manually drag and drop everything from the old HD to the external or would all this data be in the TM backup folder? Lastly with a new computer would the TM backups and the Super Duper backup be overwrited if I use the same external HD on a new computer?

Sorry this is alot of questions however I want to be sure I have my backup solution straightened out.

 

[prostuff1]

Reviving the thread I also have another question in reference to external HD's. When I buy my external HD and partition the drive for TM and Super Duper, if I buy a new computer in the next year or so and I want to transfer just my applications and personal media(documents, pictures, music etc.) would it be easier to do this using TM, Migration Assistant or the clone of my old HD in super duper? Also could I transfer just the applications from the old computer to a new one and leave the personal files on the external HD backed up without having to manually drag and drop everything from the old HD to the external or would all this data be in the TM backup folder? Lastly with a new computer would the TM backups and the Super Duper backup be overwrited if I use the same external HD on a new computer?

Sorry this is alot of questions however I want to be sure I have my backup solution straightened out.

It would probably be easier to use the Time Machine part of the drive. Unless the new computer is going to be the exact same as the old one you may not be able to restore from that one. The SuperDuper/CCC clones are usually pretty machine specific.

What i would do is this:
Create a partition a little larger then your HD for SuperDuper
Create 2 more partitions: 1 for Time Machine and 1 to drag random files to.

I do something similar to the NAS I have sitting in the basement. I SuperDuper to a firewire external and I rsync files to the server in the basement, and I also have a random "storage" area for the files i download and keep for a while and then trash.