Setting up Iomega external hard drive on ibook

[Okvalleyguy]

I have purchased the Iomega Black Series 250 GB Firewire/Usb hard drive. I want to do a full back up from my 30 GB on my iBook. I also want to be able to store tunes /pictures and other big stuff so the iBook is not jammed all the time.
I am confused as to what to do ?, what software should i use ?
It is sitting on my kitchen table and i am scared to plug it in.
Any help or ideas on what you think would get it off the table and plugged in.
i am a newly converted mac guy and do appreciate this form for the help and the friendship that goes with Apple, cheers

 

[mfacey]

What I did was the following:

I have 250GB external drive and a 100GB internal drive.
I have an exact copy of my internal drive on the external.

What I did was created two partitions on the external drive. I made one 100GB like my internal drive, and the remainder 150GB which can be used for everything else. (You can do all this in disk utility).
I never touched the 100GB partition and use it only for backing up my HD.

For the actual back up I use Silverkeeper which is bundled with my Lacie drive, but can be downloaded for free here: http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10097
I'm pretty sure it works on any external drive. There are a few other options out there too. Carbon Copy Cloner I've heard is also quite good.
A simple search for backup utilities on macupdate or versiontracker will get you a lot of options.