Time Machine questions… Partitioning a new 4TB external USB 3 drive.
1. I have two boot drives, an older one for Snow Leopard 10.6.8, and a newer one for Yosemite 10.10.2, with each currently in use about 50/50% of the time. (I have sporadic projects and a few apps that must run on SL.) My current SL boot drive uses 650 GB of 900 GB. I rarely delete anything. My current SL backup takes about 950GB on a 1.5 TB external drive partition. I mount the Time Machine partition about once a day for backups when using SL.
2. Does it matter at all if I format (GUID partition) the new drive using SL or Yosemite?
3. My plan is to create about five blank (GUID) partitions on the new 4TB external drive:
3a. Backup partition for the 1TB SL boot drive (1.5 TB)
3b. Backup partition for the 1TB Yosemite boot drive (1.5 TB)
3c. A spare boot partition, for future use, maybe for BootCamp? (How big should this be? I was thinking 100-250GB maybe.)
3d. Another spare partition, maybe for booting another OS in the future… Maybe 100-250GB? (For reference, currently SL or Yos can very happily live in a 40GB boot partition.)
3e. With the remaining space, probably more than 500GB, planing to create a DOS-FAT32 partition for future use with Windows —— I like to keep all my data separate from any boot partition that may be used with Windows.
Since I have not yet used BootCamp or any virtual OS manager except for VMWare Fusion (v 5.x on Snow Leopard) I am thinking separate partitions would be best in the future. I did not use a separate partition in the past —— SL and VMware and WinXP and Win7 all in one partition on the SL boot drive.)
4a. What is a good strategy for backing up a BootCamp/Windows partition in this environment?
4b. Can TimeMachine backup everything/anything, including the BootCamp partition for Windows?
Any comments or strategy for partitioning for TimeMachine backups and for virtual machines?
Thanks for any helpful suggestions. Anything interesting or useful to me will be upvoted!
1. I have two boot drives, an older one for Snow Leopard 10.6.8, and a newer one for Yosemite 10.10.2, with each currently in use about 50/50% of the time. (I have sporadic projects and a few apps that must run on SL.) My current SL boot drive uses 650 GB of 900 GB. I rarely delete anything. My current SL backup takes about 950GB on a 1.5 TB external drive partition. I mount the Time Machine partition about once a day for backups when using SL.
2. Does it matter at all if I format (GUID partition) the new drive using SL or Yosemite?
3. My plan is to create about five blank (GUID) partitions on the new 4TB external drive:
3a. Backup partition for the 1TB SL boot drive (1.5 TB)
3b. Backup partition for the 1TB Yosemite boot drive (1.5 TB)
3c. A spare boot partition, for future use, maybe for BootCamp? (How big should this be? I was thinking 100-250GB maybe.)
3d. Another spare partition, maybe for booting another OS in the future… Maybe 100-250GB? (For reference, currently SL or Yos can very happily live in a 40GB boot partition.)
3e. With the remaining space, probably more than 500GB, planing to create a DOS-FAT32 partition for future use with Windows —— I like to keep all my data separate from any boot partition that may be used with Windows.
Since I have not yet used BootCamp or any virtual OS manager except for VMWare Fusion (v 5.x on Snow Leopard) I am thinking separate partitions would be best in the future. I did not use a separate partition in the past —— SL and VMware and WinXP and Win7 all in one partition on the SL boot drive.)
4a. What is a good strategy for backing up a BootCamp/Windows partition in this environment?
4b. Can TimeMachine backup everything/anything, including the BootCamp partition for Windows?
Any comments or strategy for partitioning for TimeMachine backups and for virtual machines?
Thanks for any helpful suggestions. Anything interesting or useful to me will be upvoted!
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