[waterbuck]

Hi
I am trying to understand what sort of external hard drive to buy. Currently I have an old beige G3 (Jaguar) that runs Retrospect and nightly backs up my G4AlBook and my wife's PC over the network (there is a router with 4 ports). It has a little internal 80GB HD which is not ideal in size given that my G4's User folder is now 46GB (with all the movies, photos, documents, prefs, blah).

So I would like to augment the available storage for my networked backups, plus it might be nice to have something that could carry a clone of my AlBook's hard drive and boot it up in the event something goes wrong.

From what i can tell, one either can buy an external hard drive that is Ethernet/USB compatible (optimum for offering extra storage on the network through the router) or an external hard drive with Firewire (this could boot up the AlBook) but not both.

What do people think would be the best way to have something available to the network and also able to boot up my G4 Aluminum Powerbook?

The Beige G3, incidentally, does not have firewire, so I couldn't just keep a firewire drive hooked up to it, unfortunately.

Thanks

[Freeflyer]

I've had an external firewire drive for a couple of years that does exactly what you want. It backs up our two powerbooks across the network and when I'm upgrading or travelling away I can clone the drive for security.

I'd go firewire and just plug into your G3. I don't have USB2 on the powerbooks so firewire is the only sensible choice for me.

J.

[waterbuck]

It sounds like your G3 does have firewire capability. Bummer for me, because my old G3 Tower doesn't have firewire...

[Scooterboy]

LaCie makes a tripe interface drive, the D2 Extreme. Mine has FW400, FW800, and USB 2.0

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10025