Formatting/partitioning new drive

Hi there,
I've just purchased a 1 TB, WD my passport ultra external hard drive to use with my late 2013 mac running 10.9.1

I have a couple of questions
1) It says I need to reformat it to use with OSX what formatt should I use as reading on here there are several different ways to formatt ( I will be using it solely with my macs)

2) I want to clone both my mac air and IMac most likely using CCC do I need to partition the drive to do this or does it not matter

Your help is appreciated

Paul

On 1.... If you are going to use that drive only on OS X then you should format it as HFS+ ( Journaled )
On 2 ... Best way forward is to create 2 partitions . That will create 2 drives that will both mount as soon as you connect the external to either the MBA or the iMac

Cheers ... McBie

The most common format for a Mac HDD now is Mac OS Extended Journaled (HFS+)

If you want to 'clone' your Macs for restoring purposes, use Time Machine. Other applications tend to taks a snapshot every time they backup, whereas Time Machine creates a delta (meaning it saves changes) which means more backups in the same space and it's quicker. CCC might be a good choice, but unless there is a specific reason Time Machine doesn't do the job, go with the most widely supported option.

With Time Machine, you can backup as many machines as you like to one drive (space allowing) without needing to partition.

I have a couple of questions

1) It says I need to reformat it to use with OSX what formatt should I use as reading on here there are several different ways to formatt ( I will be using it solely with my macs)

2) I want to clone both my mac air and IMac most likely using CCC do I need to partition the drive to do this or does it not matter

Click to expand...

1) Format it to the Mac OS Extended Journaled File System (HFS+) GUID partition scheme.

2) Unless you partition the drive CCC will overwrite anything on there. Create two partitions, and name them whatever you wish in order to keep your CCC backups separate.

Wow that was quick,

Thanks for speedy replies, I have a 2TB airport time capsule I was going to use with time machine to back up the machines in the household but reading on here it seemed like a lot of people also opted to make a clone as well as this created a bootable back up to use in case of HDD failure??
Is this not necessary then? Also if I'm going to make a clone do I need a partitioned drive for each clone I make ? If say I wanted 2 different clones and some additional storage would I need 3 partitions ? Is that even possible??
Thanks for your help

99.999% of the time, you don't need a bootable backup, because even if your promary HDD is corrupted, holding CMD-R boots from a protected partition and allows a Time Machine backup.

However, if your HDD is completely trashed, and you don't have a DVD Drive and/or physical media, you're stuck. I'd recommend a USB boot drive (see linked article below) rather than closing your entire drive. It might seem like a better idea to have the entire drive cloned, but you're potentially using hubdreds of GBs of space, just because you need something to boot from in the event you have a one in a million HDD failure.

Mac troubleshooting: Be prepared for hard-drive failure | Macworld


And in answer to your second question, yes you need a separate BOOTABLE partition for each clone. Personally I think this adds complexity and expense that makes the cloning not worth it. You're better off with a SINGLE bootable USB drive that can restore any machine using a time machine backup.

Thank you for your advise looking through that link I think a bootable USB stick is the way to go just for peace of mind cheers

Paul

Even with Time Machine and the recovery partition in place I'll continue to have a bootable clone around. I started doing that before the recovery partition came into play. Here's a couple of scenarios where I find bootable clones useful:

In the event if a total drive failure I can boot from the clone and be up and running in the time it takes to boot from an external drive. Since I can still access Time Machine backups I'm good to go till I troubleshoot / replace the drive.

Even if the recovery partition is intact I still need to access Time Machine to re-load whatever apps/files have been deleted. If its quite a few files that can easily take more time than booting from the clone.

+1 to what Slydude stated. A bootable clone is a must when trouble shooting a flaky hard drive or for that matter a machine which won't boot.

I can give you three or four anecdotes where my bootable clone (made with CCC) saved me time and trouble. Nowadays, when Apple is shipping its OS via a download and in the event of a total HD crash, a bootable clone can be invaluable.

Is there a difference between a bootable partition and a partition or is it just the file held on that particular partition and if there is a difference how do I create a bootable partition?

A partition will be bootable with an operating system cloned or installed on it. Personally cloning is the way I prefer to go using SuperDuper. Using Smart Update once a week, takes three minutes to keep the clone a 100% copy of your hard drive.

There are two types of computer users: Those who have had a drive fail, and those who will have one fail (there may be some overlap there, but nobody gets left out). Those who are in the first category tend to have multiple backups because in the arena of hard drives, Murphy rules. (You do know Murphy's law right? "If anything can fail, it will, at the worst possible time. And if it cannot fail, it will anyway.") So being in the former category, I have dual backups of all my systems.

And as an aside, I am in the second week of trying to recover two drives for my son-in-law, who had a RAID system and therefore felt he didn't need a backup. The RAID controller failed, wiped out the partitions and directors on BOTH drives in the array. So, backup, backup, backup.

Thanks everyone for all your input I think for peace of mind I will make a clone along with carrying out TM backups
One last question the hard drive in my MBA is 128GB so if I partitioned say 200GB of my external drive am I right in thinking that will more than cover the space needed to make and keep an upto date clone whilst leaving me 800GB storage ?

There is no single answer to that question. The Time Machine backup storage requirement needs will be totally dependent on how much data you personally move on and off the machine in combination with how often you do TM backups.

I keep our TM backups running at the default hourly backup schedule - others may turn it on and off and only run it once a day or once a week.

Running them hourly:

My wife's TM backup after 6+ years, 3 upgrades to OS X on that first Mac, a new Mac with yet another version of OS X - restored from that backup on first boot and the new Mac continuing to backup to that same backup file - has 50 GB of space used on a 500 GB drive on the new Mac - the 6+ yr old TM backup file is less than 60 GB in size.

My TM backups with 2 different Macs:
One has 250 GB space used - a TM backup on that machine can grow to well over 500 GB in 3-4 months time. The other with 150 GB space used - I've watched it grow to over 400 GB in less than 6 months. I typically delete and start the TM backups over when they hit twice the size of the used space on my drives. I do not have a habit of restoring old files I have long since deleted or moved off my computers and I move a lot of data and very large files on and off my computers.

The "general" recommendation is double the size of your internal drive. However, as you can see above, you need to be somewhat familiar with how you use your computer in order to make anything resembling an educated estimate of your needs - how much data do you move onto the drive and consequently delete from it and whether you're going to run the backups at the hourly default settings or decide to use some other time frame.

I also keep a cloned bootable backup. A complete restore from a clone also takes about half the time that it takes to install OS X and then restore from TM.

+1 for what bobtomay said. I do NOT run TM hourly, but use Time Machine Scheduler to run it twice a day at Noon and Midnight (roughly). I didn't like the hourly pause in performance while TM did it's checking and backups and I didn't have any super critical things I couldn't afford to redo every hour, so that schedule meets my needs very nicely.

I also use Carbon Copy Cloner to do backups, and I have it set to archive once a day during the early morning. I have it set to do incremental backups and to archive what it replaces. It manages the archives to make room if the target drive gets full. It also has a 1TB target drive (different from the TM target). On the first clone, the target was empty, so it copied everything, now it only copies the changed files each day. The advantage to this backup is that unlike TM, it it bootable. And by having CCC archive what it is changing, I can go back to older copies of changed files if I need to, up to a limit. I let CCC delete the oldest archives to make room for the new files when it needs to do so. That way I never miss a backup for lack of space.