Backup laptop - partition external drive?

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I'm about to backup everything on my laptop before I take it to Glastonbury festival and get it filled with mud. I have an external hard drive for this purpose - brand new 250GB LaCie Rugged, which I intend to also use for transporting files in the future.

I'm going to use Carbon Copy to backup, and I thought - should I partition the LaCie to make a 70GB (the size of the laptop HD) drive for the backup/laptop clone? Would it be happier like that? I'd rather leave it unpartitioned as it's more flexible that way, but I don't want to end up with it swamped full of files and getting mixed up further down the line

Advice & guidance much appreciated!
 
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Forgot to say MAcBook, not "laptop"
..the problem is I don't really know if the clone NEEDS to have its own defined space / partition.
 

cwa107


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I'm about to backup everything on my laptop before I take it to Glastonbury festival and get it filled with mud. I have an external hard drive for this purpose - brand new 250GB LaCie Rugged, which I intend to also use for transporting files in the future.

I'm going to use Carbon Copy to backup, and I thought - should I partition the LaCie to make a 70GB (the size of the laptop HD) drive for the backup/laptop clone? Would it be happier like that? I'd rather leave it unpartitioned as it's more flexible that way, but I don't want to end up with it swamped full of files and getting mixed up further down the line

Advice & guidance much appreciated!

I'm not terribly familiar with CarbonCopyCloner, but from what I understand, much like SuperDuper, it needs the entire partition free to do a backup. Anything else that resides in that partition will be overwritten. So, making an adequately sized partition, dedicated to backups would not be a bad idea if you intend to store other data on it as well.
 

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