Another Newbie question by your's truly.

Hi all -

Hope all is well. I have yet another newbie question. I am using a 2tb external hard drive to use as my time capsule, and would also like to use this device as storage space for all my photo's and iTunes and documents. I would prefer to use this as the main method for storage. Leaving the hard drive on the iMac free. So here are my questions?

1 - Can this be done?
2 - Should I partition the hard rive? Say 500gb for time capsule 750gb for photo 750 for iTunes and 250gb for documents?
3 - Should I just create folders on the external hard drive?
4 - Whats the positives and negatives of partitioning the hard drive?
5 - How do I do either one? Is there a place or a document on this great forum where one could learn how to do it? If not here, what are some good site's to learn how to do things like that?

I have had my mac for almost four weeks, and I absolutely love it. I want to be able to know how to use it to the fullest extent possible. So thank you in advance for all answers.

Hwilensky

If it was up to me - I would partition the drive. I usually aim for my back up drive to be the same size as my internal, then extra as storage. This way you keep the data separate from eachother.

There isnt really a "negative" to partitioning a drive. Its basically just making a hard drive pretend its two hard drives.

I would probably partition the drive and use one partition for Time Machine and one partition for the other data (music, photos, etc). Each of those could have separate partitions if you like but to me the just adds to the confusion.

This slide show should walk you through the partitioning process if you decide it is necessary How to partition an external hard drive | Macworld

Would it be possible to set the default save section for iTunes or iWork to go directly to the external instead of saving on the internal hard drive?

iTunes yes, iWork no (kinda).

iWork will automatically assume you want to save any new documents in the same place you saved the last documents.

PS. If you partition the drive to be one part TM and another part media, how are you going to back up the media drive?

@chas - that´s´a really good question ;-)

you can put your iTunes library and iPhoto library on an external drive. but not sure about documents - actually doesn't matter anyway as you can always save the documents where you want?

chas_m said:

iTunes yes, iWork no (kinda).

iWork will automatically assume you want to save any new documents in the same place you saved the last documents.

PS. If you partition the drive to be one part TM and another part media, how are you going to back up the media drive?

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Good question, I did not even think about that. Any suggestions?

Hwilensky

Here's what I do: next to my machine are four external hard drives. They've served different purposes at different times, but here's how they are assigned now:

(you can see what machine I have on my stats, I have a 500GB in it currently)

External Drive 1 is a 1TB drive used for Time Machine Backups.
External Drive 2 is a 500GB drive used for a bootable clone
External Drive 3 is a 1TB drive used for media (videos, music, et al)
External Drive 4 is a 1TB drive that backs up the media drive (using Carbon Copy Cloner)

I amassed these over time as I needed them so the expense wasn't a big deal (three of them are FW, one is USB2, in fact now that I think about it I won the USB2 one in a contest).

Some things that are really hard to recreate if lost are also backed up off-site (DVDs of photos, some stuff in iCloud etc). While I do live in a part of the world that is prone to earthquakes, my relative risk of disaster here is low so I'm pretty content with the setup and redundancy on key elements.

You might as well be speaking french to me, chas_m. So many questions to ask you but I will begin with, what is a bootable clone? and why is it good?

A bootable clone is a copy of your Mac's internal hard drive -- including all of the system files needed to boot the computer from the external drive. If the internal drive were to fail you could power up the Mac while holding down the Option key and select the external drive and boot from there.

In the event of a computer disaster you can be back up and running in the time it takes to reboot. I Have run that way for a couple of days before while waiting for Apple to ship me a replacement hard drive (old one croaked while still under Applecare).

Slydude said:

A bootable clone is a copy of your Mac's internal hard drive -- including all of the system files needed to boot the computer from the external drive. If the internal drive were to fail you could power up the Mac while holding down the Option key and select the external drive and boot from there.

In the event of a computer disaster you can be back up and running in the time it takes to reboot. I Have run that way for a couple of days before while waiting for Apple to ship me a replacement hard drive (old one croaked while still under Applecare).

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Isn't that what Timeline is for?

I assume you mean Time Machine? Not exactly. A Time Machine Backup can restore your data but cannot be used to boot the Mac. Time Machine is a great idea for what it does restoring accidentally deleted data/going back to a previous version of a document. It's great for restoring files but doesn't get the entire system back operational quickly.

When my hard drive died booting from the clone took only a few seconds longer than booting from my internal drive. Once booting was complete I could do anything I needed to with the Mac just as if I had booted from the original drive. If I had only relied on Time Machine I would have to boot from the instal DVD and then wait while the entire system gets restored.

Slydude said:

I assume you mean Time Machine? Not exactly. A Time Machine Backup can restore your data but cannot be used to boot the Mac. Time Machine is a great idea for what it does restoring accidentally deleted data/going back to a previous version of a document. It's great for restoring files but doesn't get the entire system back operational quickly.

When my hard drive died booting from the clone took only a few seconds longer than booting from my internal drive. Once booting was complete I could do anything I needed to with the Mac just as if I had booted from the original drive. If I had only relied on Time Machine I would have to boot from the instal DVD and then wait while the entire system gets restored.

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Thanks for the info. However, I bought the iMac brand new and my mac did not come with a disk, it came already loaded. Am I missing something. How would I go about creating a bootable clone? I do have a brand new 1TB Seagate go flex lying around, I could use that. Secondly, should I have a set up like Chasm_m and get another HD for my files and I tunes?
I have a 2Tb external for time machine and what I thought would be misc. files. But I guess thats not the right thing to do?

Thanks,
Hwilensky

The lack of a boot disk is a good reason to create a clone. In essence, you use an appropriate cloning program to copy the contents of your hard drive to the external hard drive. Here's an article that I wrote a few years ago that might clear things up a bit ATPM 8.10 - How To: The Cloning of a Mac. You must of course use newer versions of the software mentioned obviously but the general principles remain the same.

I just cloned my Lion system a few days ago using Carbon Copy Cloner - Home. I used it because I wasn't sure other software mentioned could properly clone the Lion Recovery partition. To answer your question I did it by copying from the internal (boot/source) drive to the external (destination) drive without ever using a CD/DVD.

As far as your second question is concerned it is possible to have your Time Machine drive also contain other files. If Time Machine starts running out of room it deletes some of its older backups but doesn't touch other files.

I have a few files on my Time Machine drive right now without any problems. Having said that many users choose to have Time machine files on a drive by themselves or to partition the drive so that the Time Machine files are separate from other files.

Should I partition the external drive that I have Time Machine on. Say 1TB for Time Machine(only have a 500gb internal hard drive) and 1TB for files? If i do partition it will I lose the existing time machine files that already exist? Or should I buy a 500gb external hard drive use that for the clone, leave the time machine alone and use the extra 1tb hd i have for for files? This all so new and confusing to me, so thank you all in advance for your help and your patience.

Thanks,
Hwilensky

Hwilensky said:

Should I partition the external drive that I have Time Machine on. Say 1TB for Time Machine(only have a 500gb internal hard drive) and 1TB for files?

Click to expand...

We get this question a lot, and my usual answer is "sure, but then how are you going to back up the second partition that you're using for files?"

If i do partition it will I lose the existing time machine files that already exist?

Click to expand...

Not if you do it right by using Disk Utility.

Or should I buy a 500gb external hard drive use that for the clone, leave the time machine alone and use the extra 1tb hd i have for for files?

Click to expand...

You can do that also. I would consider that a bit safer because under the "partition" plan, if that hard drive were to fail your TM backups would be gone (but they're just backups, so that's not that big of a deal) but then so would your other files you were storing on the other partition.

Two separate drives means that the odds are lower that you'd lose both volumes (but of course you still need to somehow back up the "files" volume ...)

As usual, thanks, Chas_m. You and every one else here has definitely been a lot of help to me on my journey, if guys could figure out my email problem that would be awesome. However, I have one more question, Isn't using all of these drives a little overkill?

Hwilensky

Hwilensky said:

However, I have one more question, Isn't using all of these drives a little overkill?

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Depends on the value of your data (or more accurately, what you're willing to do to avoid having to re-create/reconstruct or avoid losing the data), I guess.

Some people figure they can put the system back on from disc or recovery partition pretty easily, so they just back up "their stuff."

Some people feel that only the stuff you can't re-download somewhere is worth backing up.

For me, it's a question of how fast can I be back up and running if disaster strikes. I could re-download a lot of things I have, but that would take a really long time.

So what with the price of hard drives being so low, I invest in those in order to save time later.

At a minimum, a backup should ALWAYS be kept on its own media or at least on a different media from the files you want backed up. Otherwise there would be no point in creating the backup. If the drive contains both your files AND your backup (even though they are on different partitions) fails, you've lost everything.

An even better backup is kept in a different (off-site) location, but that is just not practical for home users.

My suggestion, if you don't want to keep any files on the internal hard drive, is to use at least 2 external drives. One will be your storage drive for your files, the other will be your backup drive, whatever method you choose. Others have gone into greater detail on the different backup methods in this thread so I won't go into those. Personally, I use Time Machine. I keep all my files (music, video, photos, etc.) on an external anyway, so if my internal hard drive fails it's only an hour or so to reinstall the OS and restore my apps and whatnot from the Time Machine backup. My computer isn't a mission-critical system, and I spend all day at work worrying about keeping those up, so I can't be bothered with all that when I get home. I just let my Mac do its thing automatically with Time Machine instead of worrying about bootable clones and whatnot.

So this is the plan, please correct me if I am wrong at any stage. I am going to use my existing 2TB that currently has time machine on it. I am going to partition the drive. 1TB Time machine and 1TB media files.
I am going to take the 2nd external drive attach it and use Carbon Copy and create a clone. Thats the way I am going. Anything else I should know or do?

Hwilensky