Time Machine Drive Partition, Booting

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.

In order for your idea to work, you would have to install Snow Leopard to the external drive. Assuming you partitioned it as two partitions, install Snow Leopard to the first partition. Reserve the second partition for Time Machine backups. The drive of course has to be formatted to HFS+.

Regards.

superduper is free when it comes to cloning your HD.

nictan said:

superduper is free when it comes to cloning your HD.

Click to expand...

SuperDuper is not free. A free trial exists which can be used but is limited in what it will do. Carbon Copy Cloner which is a similar product is donation ware.

Regards.

nictan said:

superduper is free when it comes to cloning your HD.

Click to expand...

and SuperDuper does cloning and bootable back ups - not the same thing.

Like I said, if I'm going to get one of CCC and SuperDuper, I'd rather get CCC as it offers (or so I have been led to believe) all the functionality of SuperDuper, but for free.

Can I browse files in backups from CCC as one can with Time Machine backups?

gadje said:

Like I said, if I'm going to get one of CCC and SuperDuper, I'd rather get CCC as it offers (or so I have been led to believe) all the functionality of SuperDuper, but for free.

Can I browse files in backups from CCC as one can with Time Machine backups?

Click to expand...

Although Carbon Copy Cloner does exactly the same thing as SuperDuper (and is actually rated better than SuperDuper by MacWorld) it isn't "FreeWare". It's what's known as "donation ware". In other words, you send the author a donation of what you think it's worth.

And yes, you can browse individual files and folders from the clone backup that CCC makes. Browsing and extracting files from a CCC backup is easier than Time Machine. The difference being that CCC only keeps the latest file or folder you backed up whereas Time Machine keeps as many copies as it has room for.

Regards.