Back up drive-Partition or not?

[aved]

Trying to figure out what I should do. I have a PB G4 (10.4.5) with a 100GB HD which is about 90% full and just got a Lacie 300GB external HD today. I want to use the Lacie for a complete system backup and also for extra storage-I have a lot of movies. I plan on backing up my system every couple weeks but I will probably transfer the movies around quite a bit. My questions are:

-Should use 2 partitions on the Lacie? One for system and one for storage? If I use 2 should I set the system partition to exactly the same size as my internal disk, slightly larger or slightly smaller? I have never tried to recover a system from an external and am not sure how that works.

-I have also heard that partitioning an external is not wise unless you are trying to set up a dual OS disk, which I am not. Any truth to that? Either way I have ample storage for my needs and am basically looking for ease in recovery should my PB commit seppuku.

Thanks!

 

[jbarley]

I use an external firewire drive for my system backups.
I have 4 partitions on it, 2 are used to keep clones of my system drive, these are both bootable, 1 I use for daily incremental backups of my Home folder, and the last is for my iTunes and iPhoto libraries.
This setup works well for me.
There are several ways to select which disk to boot from,
-System Preferences-Startup Disk
-Press Option key on startup
-Use the Install CD and select Startup Drive from the top menu bar

I use SuperDuper for my Cloning, but have also used CarbonCopy (free),
both do the job well.

jb.

 

[aved]

Thanks for the reply jbarley. On your system backup partitions did you make them larger than the original?

 

[dmetzcher]

Thanks for the reply jbarley. On your system backup partitions did you make them larger than the original?

I do something similar to jbarley, except I only have two partitions. One is for the clone, one is for files. I have a 30 GB drive in my iBook, and I have to 30 GB partition on the external FireWire drive. You will not clone a drive and find that the space required is more than the size of the hard drive you are cloning, so, making it the same size as your drive is a more-than-safe bet.

 

[fryke]

I'd make it 1 MB bigger. Don't want to end up being short of a few KB or something. ... But yes, I'd partition for this task, because is cleaner if the volume is for this task only in my opinion. It's also more "tidy". But two partitions are enough. One 100.1 GB for cloning, the rest for additional data.

 

[jbarley]

Thanks for the reply jbarley. On your system backup partitions did you make them larger than the original?

The partion size for my clones is the same size as my system boot partition, this works well for me in part because the data on my boot partition is never anywhere near the max capacity of the partition.

Also the reason I keep more then 1 clone backup is because I have been in the position where the most recent clone I was trying to restore from, had the same problems that I was trying to correct.
Having an earlier clone to fall back on, plus my daily data backups made an almost complete restore possible.

jb.

 

[simbalala]

Having an earlier clone to fall back on, plus my daily data backups made an almost complete restore possible.

I use 2 FW drives, each partioned into two partitions. This allows for the traditional Grandfather, Father, Son backup scheme. The newest backup overwrites the oldest. So I still have versions of known good data all the time.

 

[aved]

Thanks ya'll

 

[dmetzcher]

I'd make it 1 MB bigger. Don't want to end up being short of a few KB or something. ... But yes, I'd partition for this task, because is cleaner if the volume is for this task only in my opinion. It's also more "tidy". But two partitions are enough. One 100.1 GB for cloning, the rest for additional data.

Would it really ever need to be any bigger? I was going to suggest this myself, and then thought that it wasn't worth typing, because there is virtually no way that a user could have their entire hard drive completely filled, and still be able to use their machine.

In other words, if you have 30 GB available, and you are using 30 GB, aren't you already in a ton of trouble simply because you have allowed your drive to fill to capacity? If you had a full drive, and you try to run backup software (or any application, really), aren't you going to have problems even getting the software to run.

Of course, I could be missing something here, in which case I might want to increase the size of my backup partition.

 

[ra3ndy]

waitasec... a 30gb hard drive is really only about 27.7 gb of real storage, right?

While a 30gb partition is actually 30gb, so I don't see where you'd run into a problem with storage overrun. Is my logic flawed?

 

[profx]

I wouldn't go with a partition. If I were you I would use disk utility to capture the disk then save it to your external. That way you can keep multiple backups, save on storage (as you can compress the disk image) and be able to use Apple Restore feature in disk utility if you ever needed to restore your drive back.

Disk utility has 2 modes is can run in - File Copy and block copy. The File copy mode allows you to create the disk image without starting from the OS Install CD. Block copy takes an exact copy of the disk - to do this it needs to unmount the drive, so you have to startup off the OS Install CD as you cannot unmount the startup disk!

I have successfully restored from a file copy disk image before.

A note to be aware of - If you do a Block Copy Image you can only restore to the same size drive. I recommend using a File Copy Image but it will take slightly longer to run.

 

[dmetzcher]

waitasec... a 30gb hard drive is really only about 27.7 gb of real storage, right?

While a 30gb partition is actually 30gb, so I don't see where you'd run into a problem with storage overrun. Is my logic flawed?

You are correct. I was actually rounding up. My partition on the FireWire drive is actually 29.88GB, not 30GB. That's still about 2GB more than I need it to be, however, because, as you said, it's all about the useable space on a drive, not the actual size of the drive (unless we are both wrong).

 

[dmetzcher]

I wouldn't go with a partition. If I were you I would use disk utility to capture the disk then save it to your external. That way you can keep multiple backups, save on storage (as you can compress the disk image) and be able to use Apple Restore feature in disk utility if you ever needed to restore your drive back.

Disk utility has 2 modes is can run in - File Copy and block copy. The File copy mode allows you to create the disk image without starting from the OS Install CD. Block copy takes an exact copy of the disk - to do this it needs to unmount the drive, so you have to startup off the OS Install CD as you cannot unmount the startup disk!

I have successfully restored from a file copy disk image before.

A note to be aware of - If you do a Block Copy Image you can only restore to the same size drive. I recommend using a File Copy Image but it will take slightly longer to run.

I use SuperDuper to keep a clone of my drive. Yes, it's just one clone, and it doesn't keep multiple copies of files as I edit them, but it works for me. Wouldn't using Disk Utility require more time each time you do a backup than an incremental clone would? It took me a few hours to make the initial backup, but backups take about 13 minutes now, because only the updated/added/deleted files are edited on the clone.

If you wanted to keep multiple clones, and use something like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper, you could partition the drive into more than one volume (say, three or four), and use each one as an incremental cloning volume, alternating from one to the next each week, or every three days, or something like that. That way you'd only be spending 10-30 minutes every time you did a backup, but you'd still have multiple backups just in case you deleted something, ran a backup, and then realized you needed the file you just trashed. Does that make sense?