Setting Up External Hard Drive

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So I finally upgraded my 80 GB Seagate hard drive from college to a 2 TB iomega. I'm somewhat confused and looking for questions on how to use it.

My girlfriend and I both will be using it, we both use macbook pro's. We want to have clones of each using carbon copy cloner, and also storage space for movies, pictures, etc so we free up space from mac pro's hard drive.

When I ran carbon copy cloner the first time last night it worked great except it just add the half dozen or so folders from the clone right on the top level of the drive as opposed to having them organized neatly in a folder. Anyway, based on my needs any good suggestions on how to set this up with folders or partitions to meet my needs? I'm totally new to this so if you think you understand my problem better than me feel free to answer the question you think I should be asking.

Thanks!
 

bobtomay

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Your Mac's Specs
15" MBP '06 2.33 C2D 4GB 10.7; 13" MBA '14 1.8 i7 8GB 10.11; 21" iMac '13 2.9 i5 8GB 10.11; 6S
A clone is going to delete everything on the partition and make is exactly the same as what is on your Mac. You cannot store multiple clones, nor indeed any other data on a partition where you are creating a bootable clone.

What you are wanting to do is a bad idea.

You can create 2 partitions and clone each of your machines to a separate partition.

But, moving your pics, movies, etc. to that drive - and only having them stored in that single location - you're back to the same place you started - no backup for them.

If you have gotten so much data (imho - try to maintain 30% free space on any partition with an operating system for best experience with your computer - and I don't care what size the drive/partition happens to be) then it's time to upgrade the internal drive in your machine.

Don't want to upgrade your drives, then you seriously need to get two external drives to store those pics and movies on, unless you really don't care about them going up in smoke.

This is a serious decision - you either need to setup enough drives to have all your data in 2 places or decide what data you can afford to lose when a drive dies. And also recognize that having data stored in only two places - in your house - does not prevent data loss from theft, fire, etc.
 

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