To Time Machine or no?

[aceracer195195]

Greetings forum!
I am currently using a Mac Mini which is about 9 months old. My question is this: I have all of my movies, music, pictures, etc on an external hard drive which is getting full. Would it be worth it to use time machine on my old external hard drive (~100GB) when I upgrade to a new one?

Additionally, if I use time machine anyway, would it just be backing up my internal hard drive or is everything included that is connected to my mac?
Ace

 

[blodwyn]

So the question is, how unhappy would you be if you lost all the data either on your Mini hard disk, or your external?

If the answer is 'Don't care', then don't bother with any backups. But you should backup any disk that has data on it that you care about losing, internal or external.

This post should answer your other question.

 

[TH-Gunner]

Don't use a drive that's getting full for backups.

I believe TM only backs up your internal HDD. It won't backup USB flash drives or external HDDs.

I recommend you always have a backup of your data, whether it be a TM backup or a CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) backup.

 

[7031]

I believe TM only backs up your internal HDD. It won't backup USB flash drives or external HDDs.

Not completely true. While it does by default, you can set it to back up other drives as well.

 

[aceracer195195]

Ok, thanks for the info everyone.
TH-Gunner: my plan was to copy everything over to my new external then use the old one for time machine. But i guess based on blodwyn's link i can't do that.
Anyone have any good external hard drive recommendations?
Ace

 

[aceracer195195]

Another question poped up while i was doing some shopping.
If i get a large external hard drive & partition it into 2 parts, can i have one set for time machine and the other for storage? Or is that not a good idea?

Ace

 

[TH-Gunner]

Ok, thanks for the info everyone.
TH-Gunner: my plan was to copy everything over to my new external then use the old one for time machine.

You can do that. Either drag and drop everything from the old HDD to the new one, or use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to completely copy the old HDD to the new one.

Then after everything is copied, simply wipe the old HDD and set it up for Time Machine.

Another question poped up while i was doing some shopping.
If i get a large external hard drive & partition it into 2 parts, can i have one set for time machine and the other for storage? Or is that not a good idea?

Ace

There's no need to partition it. You can have TM backups on the disk and have other stuff on the disk at the same time.

It looks like this:

Backups are stored in a folder on the HDD. That's all. You can still put whatever else you want on the disk around it.

 

[aceracer195195]

Ok, thanks for the info. My idea of backing up so far has been storing everything on an external drive & just using the files off of it.
Thought it might be time to change my habits.
Ace

 

[polar-blair]

Another question poped up while i was doing some shopping.
If i get a large external hard drive & partition it into 2 parts, can i have one set for time machine and the other for storage? Or is that not a good idea?

Ace

Thats pointless though, the reason why you back up is because incase you drive fails you have the files on backup, but if the external drive fails, which has movies, music, photos etc... (The big important files) but this also has all your backups on it to so then you loose everything except from your internal drive. So there is no point backing up the external drive that has time machine on it, it only wastes space.