I recieved as a gift an external 3 TB HDD, and I want to set up two partitions; a 2 TB for general backup, and 1 TB for time machine. Anything I should know about before I do this? Thanks
iMac 21.5_3.06 i3_4 GB RAM_OSX10.6
sowack,
Sorry to rain on your parade but that strategy is an EXTREMELY bad idea. An EHD used for backup (whether it's Time Machine or a bootable clone) should be dedicated to one duty only. Putting 2 backups on the same physical drive is extremely dangerous. The reason being is when (not if but when) that drive fails you will have lost all your backup. It's smart to have 2 or more backups but they should be on physically separate devices. EHD's are inexpensive so my recommendation would be to buy another EHD and put each backup on different drives. I'd use the 3TB as your Time Machine drive because eventually TM will use all the space. You can get a much smaller drive to handle a bootable clone, it only needs to be as large as the amount of data stored on the HD.
Pretty simple procedure if you've used Disk Utility before as you'll just need to create two partitions on your external HDD.
But you should think carefully over the size of your Time Machine Partition. As a general rule, the size of your external hard drive being used for Time Machine Backup should be 1.2 x the amount of data currently being used up on your Mac's internal hard drive, time machine needs the additional space in order to function.
I think it is safer to make your time machine partition 1.2 x the size of your internal hard drive (not just 1.2 x the size of data currently used), in the event that you completely fill your internal hard drive and wish to create a complete backup of the whole drive and all its data.
To add, I wouldn't go as far as saying your idea is a bad one. I guess you want to partitition because you don't want to dedicate the full 3TB of your hard drive you received as a gift be purely used up by Time Machine. And although you call the other partition 'General Backup' I guess you'd use this space to store specific files that won't be stored in Time Machine (as you'll back up the file manually) so then it would be the same as if you were to let Time Machine automatically backup that file and use the whole 3TB, or you might use this partition for general file transfers? Either way partitioning enables more flexible use of the 3TB which seems your solution required.
External HDD partition for Time Machine questions
