Question about external hard drive, PS3 and Time Machine

I 'feel' ya. I have a old white 20" iMac, MB Pro and white macbook. The HD in my macbook just blew up. I had a Time Capsule and thought all was well. However, it turns out the the Time Machine tried to make back ups off of the mac book with the blown HD and it corrupted all of the back ups for the 1 mac, the others are OK.

Anyway, not really answering your question am I? What I like to do is to partition the external HD (FireWire 800 all the way) and use the different partitions for different uses (windows, macs, work, home, etc). This is NOT needed of course, but if you like to add and delete a lot of stuff off of there it is safer, at least the way I work. Also, I don't believe you can play moves off of the HD from the back up, I think it is just one blob. Well, that is true for back up anyway, I think a TM backup is actually a flat file system, just like your HD.

I would look at installing a media center like component on your mac that lets your PS3 see it and play media off of it. I tried a demo of one and it worked well, I could stream movies, pictures and music from my iMac to the PS3. I never ended up paying for it though since I have a TiVo and stream NetFlix.

Now if my **** new 24" iMac 3ghz, ATI 4850 would ship I would be happy!

Good luck to you.
--greg.

Oh, and START backing up! It does happen and it will happen to you!

I now back up to TC, external HD and Amazon S3! 🙂 Maybe I am over doing it though huh? It is a good feeling to have Amazon taking care of all of my pictures though.

Time Machine will back up everything unless you tell it otherwise, this a wise thing to do. Items that don't change they are only backed up once, after the initial backup TM will only back up new or changed material. The first TM back up takes quite awhile because it is backing up the complete drive, after that backups are normally short unless there is a lot of new material. In the TM Preferences you can also tell it items you do not want backed up however you need to choose these one by one.

If you do not want hourly backups you can download a utility such as Time Machine Editor and tell it how often you want backups to occur.

A couple of items you should know TM is NOT a bootable backup system, so if your internal drive crashes you cannot boot your iMac from it directly.

Q1. You can make a bootable backup by getting one of the following applications: Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. CCC is free and SuperDuper is about $27.00 however it is supported and the support is excellent. If your existing Lacie drive is the same capacity as your internal drive then I would use that as a bootable clone. I would also strongly recommend getting another external drive that is at least 2X the size of your internal drive and use that as a Time Machine backup. That is how I (and lots of others) have their systems set up. That way you have backup of very old files that you may need sometime and have a clone of your internal drive in case the internal drive crashes. I have 3 Firewire 800 external drives daisy chained together, I use one as my TM drive, one as my SuperDuper drive and the third I keep my photos and music on. I also have TM set up to back up my photos and music drive. This way I have 2 backups of my internal drive and access to files as old as my original TM backup.

Q2. I can't answer your second question as I have no experience with PS3.

Q3. You don't have to use TM (IMHO it's dumb not to but that is your decision) and yes you can drag and drop to an external drive. As long as the files are readable by Windows (I'm assuming that is what you are running on the Dell) then the Dell should read them. For example if you have a PDF on your iMac then sure it will be readable by Windows. If you run MS Office on the iMac sure those files will also be readable by the Windows version of MS Office. However if you are running Aperture on the iMac that is a OS X only application and not readable by Windows.

Your 1 TB Lacie is perfect for Time Machine!

If you back up your system once, lets say today for example. Then over the next 4 months you add lots of pictures, music, and other things. Then one morning 4 months from now your internal drive crashes, if you only have back up of the things you backed up today then you lost all that new music, pictures and other things you added.

Now lets say you use Time Machine begining today it will back up EVERYTHING on your machine today and then will back up all the stuff you add over the course of time automatically. TM DOES NOT backup everything every time it backs up only the new or changed stuff. So let's use the same scenario OK....you do a back up using TM today, then over the next 4 months you add pictures, music and other stuff. Then one morning 4 months from now your internal drive crashes, you run to get it fixed and get a new internal drive installed. Then all you need to do is restore your system from TM and you get back EVERYTHING you had on your TM drive and you can get going just like the day before your internal drive crashed.

The whole idea of TM is it will back up files for you automatically, you don't have to remember to drag and drop or start a back up program. Then if you accidentally erase something or make a revision to something and need an earlier version (school work for example) on your internal drive you can use TM to restore it in seconds. Or let's say your internal drive crashes once you get your iMac repaired you have all stuff just waiting for you on TM ready to go back on to your new internal HD.

It's really a simple concept, read about it here:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html

Last a bootable drive is a drive you can start your computer from. The internal drive on you iMac is a bootable drive, if you get another external drive and make it bootable (in your case you would only need a 320GB drive) if your internal drive crashes you could use the bootable drive to start your computer and run it from. They're great in case of an emergency.

No problem, I'm happy to help if I can.

+"So a bootable drive means if my internal drive fails I can boot up from the bootable external"+ Yes that's it! No you do not need a bootable drive to use files on someone else's computer. Yes SuperDuper (not Super Drive) can make your Lacie 1TB a bootable drive for only $27.00 no there are not disadvantages to doing that.

Yes you could partition your Lacie partially to TM and partially to your PS3. That isn't advisable either, the reason being is if the Lacie crashes and dies you have lost not only all your TM data but your PS3 data! Yikes a scary thought! When you partition a drive you are making it into separate drives. For example if you made 5 partitions that would equal = 5 separate drives. Yes if you do decide to partition your Lacie you could partition part of it as a FAT32 (in Disk Utility FAT32 is called MS-DOS FAT) and part as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Again my advice is to use your Lacie as your TM drive, as finances permit add a drive for your PS3 and another as a bootable backup drive. The good news is drives are coming way down in price and if you're a good shopper deals are out there. I got lucky a couple of months ago and found 2 brand new 320 GB Lacie Quadra D2's on Ebay for $42.00 each! I use one as my SuperDuper drive and the other I sold for a profit.

Regards,
Roger

To Partition a drive, start Disk Utility, choose the drive on the left, click the Partition tab, identify how many partitions you want, name each partition and tell Partition how much space per partition and that's it.

You can undo a partition by reformatting.

Regards,
Roger

I might be getting tired but I'm having a little trouble understanding this last question, would you mind restating it?