[vb15]

My Imac (24" intel core 2 duo 2.4 ghz) hard drive failed the other day. It wouldnt start up past white screen however they ran disk warrior at the genius bar and it seems to be running ok now. I just ordered a lacie 1tb external drive but have some questions on how to do some of things I want to do with it.

1) How do I back-up my HD to what it is right now. Meaning if it fails tomorrow, I can just buy a new internal HD and run everything (movies, music software, leopard, microsoft office etc..) just like I am running it today

2) Am I able to do what I want in questions one while also making the drive compaitible with my PS3 so I can play movies?? I have media link to stream my stuff to my ps3 but I am out of room on my internal and would like to download movies/music straight to my external HD and play them on the ps3 from there. Is this possible?

3) Is it possible to not use time machine and just drag and drop what I want to my external, and if I do that does that make the files fine to run say on my girlfriends dell e1505??

Thanks so much in advance!

[ibook_steve]

1) Do a full Time Machine backup which can easily be restored or clone the disk using Disk Utility, or a third-party tool like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner.

2) Not with a Time Machine backup. And I don't know enough about doing that to answer whether it would work with a clone. I would think it would.

3) Files are files. It would be like copying your files to a flash drive. No problem, except that the drive would have to be formatted in a PC format to be read by the PC. Or you could purchase MacDrive, from Mediafour, to read Mac disks on the PC.

Steve

[Simon]

You can use either Time Machine or a clone in order to backup your disk in such a way that you can always recover.

To clone go to /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility > Restore. Make sure to select erase destination to make the clone bootable.