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JMan09 · Aug 8, 2005, 01:35 AM

I tried this in the phot section, but no respones so ill give it a shot here.

I am looking at getting a new iBook 12" and was going to get an external Hard Drive to store all my pictures and music. The music will be on my iPod when i get it and i can make cds to back up the music. But my question is what is the best way to back up photos? Also, what would be a good size external Hard Drive to store both music and photos? Thanks for any help.

edit: or can I have a 100GB or so External HD for only photos and music? Then have a 160 or 200GB external drive to back up the photos and music and to also back up my iBook? Will this be too much?

SpaceMonkey · Aug 8, 2005, 12:57 PM

Originally Posted by JMan09

I tried this in the phot section, but no respones so ill give it a shot here.

I am looking at getting a new iBook 12" and was going to get an external Hard Drive to store all my pictures and music. The music will be on my iPod when i get it and i can make cds to back up the music. But my question is what is the best way to back up photos? Also, what would be a good size external Hard Drive to store both music and photos? Thanks for any help.

edit: or can I have a 100GB or so External HD for only photos and music? Then have a 160 or 200GB external drive to back up the photos and music and to also back up my iBook? Will this be too much?

If you have the space, you'll find a way to use it, believe me. This leads to the oft-repeated comment that you can never have "too much" hard drive space. Your idea of two hard drives for back ups sounds good to me. How big is your iBook's internal drive? That would dictate how much smaller you can make one hard drive versus the other. Also, keep in mind that it's never a good idea to fill a hard drive completely, as that leads to file structure problems and possible corruption of your data. It's best to leave about 10-15% of the capacity free.

Just get as much hard drive space as you think you can reasonably afford for this project right now. You'll find a use for it eventually, particularly if you're talking about backing up pictures and music collections, which are ever-growing.

mania · Aug 8, 2005, 10:49 PM

I have an external firewire lacie that is double the size of my powerbook drive - so I use it to back up my User folders and any extra stuff that wont fit at all on my powerbook (iMovie projects). also what is nice about the lacie is that it has a daisychain firewire port so i can plug my videocamera into it when i download the DV and never use my internal drive. I have been using ditto called from a bash script in a cron job to back up the user folders. if you don't know what that means then try a commercial product.

JMan09 · Aug 12, 2005, 02:40 AM

I was just thinking what if I got the ibook with 100gb HD, stored the pictures and music on my iBook, until it starts to get full and I will have a better idea of how much space I need, and had an external drive just to back the whole Hard drive up.

This might be a better idea since I will just be starting at digital photography and photoshop(haven't used in 2 years since highschool.) this is what got me hooked on macs in the first place.

darthslacker · Aug 12, 2005, 04:02 AM

I would still play it safe and backup at least your photos to another drive.

audiophilegeek · Aug 15, 2005, 01:03 PM

I picked up a small enclosure for an old 80 gig laptop harddrive that a friend had given me. The little bad boy is about the size of an ipod and stores 80 gigs while at the same time powering up through my firewire port without any outside power source. I'm a constant file transfer nut and I'm always on the go since I'm a design student. It allows me the space and flexibility to grab it, toss it in my bag with an extra cable and work seamlessly on projects if I'm at school, home, or at a fellow designers house without having to unplug a ton of wires and wrap up a huge external drive.

http://www.actbuy.com/details.asp?item=CM26-211B-CO

That's the one I ordered since it was fairly inexpensive. I use it for everything, from music, to projects involving video and print work, to even streaming movies off of it to my television using my powerbook with the s video out port and the sound port through my stereo. A good site to check for the cheap harddrives in that 2.5 inch size is www.pricewatch.com. It's incredibly easy to put together and fires up out of the box in about 5 minutes assembly time. Hope that might help.

nonhuman · Aug 15, 2005, 01:51 PM

BYO external drives are usually a pretty good deal. If you get one of the OWC enclosures from macsales.com you'll get good quality at a good price. Regardless, you'll want to get one with an Oxford chipset (911 for FW 400, 912 for FW 800). As far as actual drives go, I'd recommend Hitachi (IBM) or Seagate, and not Maxtor.

raduga · Aug 17, 2005, 07:39 PM

Isn't it true that laptop hard drives are less reliable and have a shorter life than fullsize drives? Other than that, I like that tiny coolmaster case.

nonhuman · Aug 17, 2005, 07:57 PM

Originally Posted by raduga

Isn't it true that laptop hard drives are less reliable and have a shorter life than fullsize drives? Other than that, I like that tiny coolmaster case.

I've never had a laptop drive die on me, but I only buy IBM/Hitachi laptop drives, which might have something to do with it. But seeing as laptop drives have a lower spin rate I'd expect them to actually last longer so long as the parts are of the same quality (big if there, I suppose).