I'm waiting for my new MacBook Pro to arrive, and also looking at external hard drives. Having never used a Mac properly before (nor ever properly backed up files) I'd like some advice as to the best way to go about doing this.
What I'm planning to do is buy a 1TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk for Mac, and partition that into two 500GB volumes - one for Time Machine, and one for things I haven't quite thought of yet.
I know you can't boot from a Time Machine backup, so what I was thinking of doing was copying an image of the Snow Leopard install disc onto the Time Machine partition before putting backup data on it, and then letting Time Machine do its thing in the remaining 480GB or whatever it is. Will this work?
(Also, I'm aware of the existence of SuperDuper! and CarbonCopyCloner, but a) don't really want to pay £20 for functionality I could get for free, and b) I dislike having two (or more) programs which do the same thing on my computer - it seems a dreadful waste of space to me. Of course, if the only way to get a bootable external volume is to use CCC, I will begrudgingly do so.)
Cheers.
What I'm planning to do is buy a 1TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk for Mac, and partition that into two 500GB volumes - one for Time Machine, and one for things I haven't quite thought of yet.
I know you can't boot from a Time Machine backup, so what I was thinking of doing was copying an image of the Snow Leopard install disc onto the Time Machine partition before putting backup data on it, and then letting Time Machine do its thing in the remaining 480GB or whatever it is. Will this work?
(Also, I'm aware of the existence of SuperDuper! and CarbonCopyCloner, but a) don't really want to pay £20 for functionality I could get for free, and b) I dislike having two (or more) programs which do the same thing on my computer - it seems a dreadful waste of space to me. Of course, if the only way to get a bootable external volume is to use CCC, I will begrudgingly do so.)
Cheers.