[mrurmil]

Hi all,

I just bought an external FireWire HD and I was wondering how/what you guys use your external drives for? Please list details about how you have them setup. Right now I can't think of much to do with it except dragging my big media files into it. I don't even have any folders in there, just files

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[SSharon]

I use mine to backup my music files and other school documents and preferences. I use the other drive for media storage and to share files with friends when sending the files over the network isn't convenient/fast enough.
I also have an ibook so the music on the firewire drive might be considered backup for the desktop, I have itunes on my ibook pointed to it.

[mduell]

I use my external to sync documents/pictures between my two laptop OS installs (XP and Vista), to store my lossless music collection, and to copy DVDs to.

[AC Rempt]

I use mine as a backup. Carbon Copy Cloner clones my main drive once a month. Let's me sleep that much better.

[jbleisure]

I also use mine as a backup. I have a 160GB which I have partitioned. I cloned my old Panther system onto it using superduper. I did this just before I did an erase an install on my PowerBook to upgrade to Tiger. And now I clone my entire HD to the external using superduper once a week as part of my backup regime.

[as2]

250GB HD Contains

Documents Backup
Software Backups
DVD Rips
Huge (150GB+) TV Collection
Some Adult Entertainment

[k squared]

Ever since my PB hard drive crapped out on me, I've been using my external FW drive as the main boot volume. That is until I can get the internal drive replaced, of course.

This actually works OK: the external drive is connected to an external DVD-RW which is connected to the PB.

[sith33]

I have one for document backup, 5 for media storage. Mmmm... terabytes...

[Dr.Michael]

I use mine (160GB samsung spinpoint in a Sarotech hardbox) for backup. I store the current system in a bootable version (CCC) and I also have disk images of my older iBooks, Powerbooks and an old windows computer on it.

A small partition (10GB) is reserved to try new operating systems before I install them on the main machine.

[Cadaver]

I use mine (actually two 160GB drives) as a backup device for my computer and my wife's (Apple's Backup 3.0 writes nightly Home folder backups to it). Also acts as my Aperture library backup (vault) and storage for other misc. documents/installers I don't want to throw away but don't want cluttering my main drive or indexed by Spotlight.

[savagedudeguy]

- Backups
- Movies
- Torrent files

[Jasoco]

250GB Porsche:
Partition 1: OS, Users folder with bare minimum Library and Documents folder, Applications
Partition 2: Users Folder stuff - Music, Movies, Pictures, Sites (Website files), Text Files, Sound Files, Installers
Partition 3: Everything else - Pretty much everything. Torrented TV shows, bookmarks, 330MB of icons, everything I have ever downloaded ever in the last 4 years

Internal HD: Pr0n

[Miles Davis]

I posted this on macrumors, but I thought this would be a good thread to pose the question:

I have an iBook and iMac (flat panel, but unfortunately w/USB 1.0) and both have 40G hard drives. I am running out of disk space and my iBook, which is my main machine, is getting slow (it has all my music and pix on it).

I would like to get a portable firewire harddrive and place all my music on it, and then make it accessible from both computers. I would also like to do this with iPhoto as well if possible. That way, all this data will reside only on the hard drive which could be moved from computer to compter easily.

Is this even possible? If so, how do I do it. If not, what are my other options? I thought about upgrading my iBook drive, but for the extra $300, I could just sell my iBook and get a new one!

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Miles Davis

I posted this on macrumors, but I thought this would be a good thread to pose the question:

I have an iBook and iMac (flat panel, but unfortunately w/USB 1.0) and both have 40G hard drives. I am running out of disk space and my iBook, which is my main machine, is getting slow (it has all my music and pix on it).

I would like to get a portable firewire harddrive and place all my music on it, and then make it accessible from both computers. I would also like to do this with iPhoto as well if possible. That way, all this data will reside only on the hard drive which could be moved from computer to compter easily.

Is this even possible? If so, how do I do it. If not, what are my other options? I thought about upgrading my iBook drive, but for the extra $300, I could just sell my iBook and get a new one!

Sure, you can do that, but iTunes and iPhoto don't deal very well with their content suddenly going missing, you'll have to be careful not to open them while the external dive is disconnected.