Seagate not mounting AT ALL!

[drummerman345]

I just bought a Seagate FreeAgent 750 GB external hard drive and did everything exactly as the instructions said and it doesnt mount at all...I restarted my computer, used a different USB port on my computer, plugged and unplugged the AC Adapter...
Any ideas!?!?!?

 

[MacBookMe!]

Can you hear the drive spinning inside?

 

[cwa107]

Can you see it in Disk Utility? Be aware that you'll need to create a partition on it before you can see it mounted to your desktop.

 

[drummerman345]

Ok so for some reason it started working by itself...
I did partition it so that it is a 'Backup' and a 'Media' - the former is 222 GB and I've used Time Machine to back up my hard drive...
I just have a few questions:
1. Will Time Machine overwrite watever is backed up, or back it up separately?
2. Will Time Machine only re-back up what is changed or everything?
3. For my media section I backed up my Pictures, Movies, and Music folders (all my Pictures, Movies, and Music are in there) but I basically wanna free up my hard drive and I dont know any way to do it without creating a massive amount of duplicates when I back it up again (because I'll be adding more music to iTunes)...any ideas?

I hope I was clear enough...Thanks for the help!

 

[cwa107]

Ok so for some reason it started working by itself...
I did partition it so that it is a 'Backup' and a 'Media' - the former is 222 GB and I've used Time Machine to back up my hard drive...
I just have a few questions:
1. Will Time Machine overwrite watever is backed up, or back it up separately?

Time Machine is self-maintaining. You would never need to interface directly with the drive's file system. All interaction with the user is done through the Time Machine application.

2. Will Time Machine only re-back up what is changed or everything?

Initially, Time Machine does a full backup. Then, it will make incremental backups as files are added or changed since the last full backup.

3. For my media section I backed up my Pictures, Movies, and Music folders (all my Pictures, Movies, and Music are in there) but I basically wanna free up my hard drive and I dont know any way to do it without creating a massive amount of duplicates when I back it up again (because I'll be adding more music to iTunes)...any ideas?

I hope I was clear enough...Thanks for the help!

I'm a little lost of this point, but it seems you want to do a bit of manual backup in addition to the automated solution that Time Machine provides. If so, I would partition that external HDD into two parts - one should be for Time Machine backups, the other should be for use as supplemental storage.

 

[drummerman345]

I'm a little lost of this point, but it seems you want to do a bit of manual backup in addition to the automated solution that Time Machine provides. If so, I would partition that external HDD into two parts - one should be for Time Machine backups, the other should be for use as supplemental storage.

Thanks, that answered most of my questions.
And yes you are correct, that is what I want to do and I have already done that. But my main reason for this partition was so that I could free up some space on my internal hard drive, so how would I be able to keep something like my Music folder organized in such a way that I can store ALL of my music, while I add and delete from my internal hard drive...Ex: A band such as Miles Davis - I may only listen to a few of his albums, but I have all of them and will keep them all on my external, but only want a few from my internal - so obviously I'll delete them from my Music folder on my computer. BUT, if I were to back the folder itself to my external HDD then I would only have the albums which are on my computer since it would be over-written...I hope that makes for a clearer question, basically: how would I do it so that I can keep all my music organized, without duplicates, on my external HDD, while keeping some select music on my laptop...

 

[drummerman345]

b-b-b-bump