[dzp111]

Just got a new Western Digital 500 Gig usb/firewire external hard drive.

I have to say that I'm a little overwhelmed with all this new space. I can think of several things to do with it but not sure where to start, or how to go about it.

Main use for it is, of course, backup, but with this comes a few options: Cloning, Incremental backups, simple copies, partitioning, etc.

I'm thinking that with Time Machine, backup strategies have changed, or have they? That's my question I guess.

One more question: I did my research on this forum and read a lot about partitioning. Now with 500 Gigs at my disposal, seems that I can easily afford to do this. I'm thinking; 1 bootable partition; 1 backup partition using Time Machine or something like SuperDuper, and; 1 just for extra copies of personal data (music, movies, etc.) (Don't care for Windows partition)

It sounds redundant though. Dunno.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[peeb]

It all depends. Unless you want Time Machine to use all of it, you should partition, but how much you choose for that will depend on the size of the machine you are backing up.

[CharlesS]

You don't necessarily need to partition it, because you can use a Time Machine backup disk for other things too - it just makes a Backups.backupd folder which all the backups go into, but you can do whatever you want with the rest of the drive.

The one thing that might be worth making a partition for is if you want a rescue partition. This is where you can make a partition that's about 5 or 10 GB or so, put a minimal OS X installation on it, and load it up with DiskWarrior, Data Rescue, and/or whatever other disk utilities you may have. Then, if you want to run one of those utilities on your main drive, you can boot from the rescue partition and get started much quicker than with a CD.

I don't understand what the purpose of the partition for extra copies of personal data is for - isn't that what Time Machine does? At any rate, you can put whatever you want on the normal Time Machine backup drive, so I wouldn't bother with a separate partition for that.

[peeb]

Charles is right, but the issue is that if you don't partition it, Time Machine will eventually grow to fill the drive. If you don't want it to do that, you should partition.

[forumhound]

I just posted something like this here yesterday, but what you could do is to use CCC (carbon copy cloner) to clone your leopard install disk to the drive, and that will make it bootable, then you have the install disk and time machine all in one place (no worries about scratched DVD), no need to have another bootable partition for that. I have a 500gig too, and I did make a partition that i use as a scratch disk and to hold other junk that is not required to be saved long term. Good luck!