External Hard Drive

There is no such thing as a best product to buy however there are a lot of excellent solutions. My recommendation would be to get either an OWC Mercury or Lacie Quadra D2 external drive and then purchase SuperDuper for your backup software.

SuperDuper will create a bootable clone of your internal HD so if your internal HD fails you have not only a back up of your important information you can boot your computer from it too. Super Duper is only about $27 and also has excellent support if needed.

If you have the time I would also recommend reading this article, this will give you some great ideas and solutions:

http://www.macworld.com/article/141363/2009/07/backup.html

Regards,

Roger

You don't need SuperDuper, all you need is to open Disk Utility (Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility).

Highlight the WD and click on Partition.
Choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
Click on Options and choose GUID Partition Table.
You can then actually choose to have more than one partition if you'd like and you can rename the disk as well if you want.
Click on Partition. It will erase and reformat.

Hi Christine

It sounds like you have missed the Partition step, where you need to set the Partition Map Scheme to GUID Partition Table (for Intel iMacs).

Follow the instruction provided in the fantastic article by Ken Stone:
http://www.kenstone.net/fcphomepage/partitioningtiger.html

Also note near the bottom of the article:

+*Cryptic Error Message*+
+There have been some reports of problems when attempting to re format some drives (Western Digital). If you have a new drive and attempt to re format the drive as Mac OS Extended, you could get an error message that says "unknown error with the partition map".+

Hope this helps?

Dennis

Christine Davies wrote:
Thanks Barbara - that seemed to generate the same error message though.

*Partition failed with the error:*

*Could not unmount disk*

I have dragged some files and the hard disk into the external hard drive - is that what I'm supposed to do? (rather new to this), but the hard drive is still formated as MS/DOS in Disk Utility.

Follow den.thed's advice, and......

No, you do not want to simply drag the hard disk to the external HD. AFTER you get past the partition and format problem and the drive has been erased and formatted correctly, you can then use SuperDuper or CCC to clone your system onto the external. Dragging items does not create a bootable clone of your system - it simply copies them, which is fine for some important files, pictures, etc. you want to have a copy of.

That's great, your welcome and I'm glad to have helped!

Now all you have to do is follow Barbara's advise for cloning your Internal HD to the External HD and that should give you a bootable backup on the External HD to restore or in emergency run from.

When you're ready to proceed cloning, plug in your external, open SuperDuper, choose your internal hard drive (Macintosh HD) on left drop down window and your external on the right. Choose "backup all files". When done (may take a while), quit SuperDuper.

To make sure it all went well, go to System Preferences, click on Startup Disk.
Your external (clone) should show up. Click on it and click on "Restart". Your Mac should now restart into your clone on the external. Make sure things work. Again, choose Startup Disk and restart back into your internal.

You've now made sure you have a fully functioning clone/backup for emergencies. Don't forget to keep that clone up to date!

This clone is an exact copy of your entire system, so that should be good enough... however, hard drives can and do fail, so I'm extra cautious and keep my all important info incl. photos, files, financial info, etc. on three different external sources (2 hard drives and CD or DVD media). If you did not partition your external hard drive, you should not add anything to your clone; if you partitioned it, you have the clone on one and could use the other(s) for backup copy of photos etc.