Need to repartition external hard drive to use with 2 Snow Leopard Macs?

Question

Need to repartition external hard drive to use with 2 Snow Leopard Macs?

I have a WD My Book for Mac drive with 2 partitions, one for an old mac with OS Tiger and one for a Macbook with Snow Leopard. I now need to back up another Mac with Snow Leopard onto the same drive.

My question is - can I back up the other mac straight onto the existing 10.6 partition, or should I repartition the drive into 3? If I back up the second 10.6 Mac into the same partition, is there a risk of the two back-ups overwriting or otherwise getting mixed up/in each other's way etc?

And if I repartition it into 3, does this necessarily mean wiping the whole drive and then starting again, or is there a way of creating a new partition and keeping the other 2?

Thanks for any enlightenment.

Posted on May 1, 2012 4:53 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Klaus1

Level 9

52,749 points

May 1, 2012 4:58 AM in response to NickR London N8

Partitioning a hard drive:

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/partitioning_tiger.html

To resize (or delete) an existing partition without losing data, you will need to use, for example, iPartition:

http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iPartition.php

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Answer 2

May 1, 2012 5:45 AM in response to NickR London N8

Would strongly suggest investing in separate hard drives. When that drive mechanism dies (when, not if) you loose all your backups for all those machines. Also, you get more backup space by having a dedicated drive for each machine.

The cost per GB is the best it has been for platter based HDD. SSD is getting there, cost-wise.

I use a base of four inXtron pleaides combo (FireWire 400/800, USB, e-SATA) that does a brilliant job for our array of macs. BYO HDD.

Coriolis systems make some great software though. iDefrag is favorite of mine.

You could look at something like Time Capsule or similar to backup the two snow leopard machines to the one device, and leave the Tiger OS machine on the current WD MyBook.

-oz

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Answer 3

WZZZ

Level 6

13,220 points

May 1, 2012 6:18 AM in response to NickR London N8

In Snow Leopard you do not need iPartition. See this article for instructions.

http://pondini.org/OSX/DU4.html

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Answer 4

May 1, 2012 8:09 AM in response to WZZZ

Thanks for that, which is useful, but I haven't got an answer to my initial question whether it's actually necessary to create a separate partition at all for backing up two Macs with the same OS (Snow Leopard) in the same partition, ie whether they will automatically and cleanly fall into 2 separate folders or whether there is any risk of crossover.

This is something on which I've had contradictory information and I'm trying to get a definitive answer.

There is plenty of spare capacity on the 1TB drive so I'm looking to making the most of the equipment I have rather than shelling out on a load of separate drives.

Thanks - NickR

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Answer 5

WZZZ

Level 6

13,220 points

May 1, 2012 8:31 AM in response to NickR London N8

AFAIK, you will have to create separate partitions/volumes for each Mac. Otherwise, everything gets thrown in together.

http://help.bombich.com/kb/usage-scenarios/i-want-to-backup-multiple-machines-or -hard-drives-to-the-same-hard-drive

http://help.bombich.com/kb/overview/preparing-your-backup-disk-for-a-backup-of-m ac-os-x

I may be repeating what has already been said, but backing up an internal to the same internal is a crazy idea. The main point of a backup is to have redundancy in case of drive faliure, which can happen at any time without warning.

Backing up several Macs to different partitions on the same external, while not preferable, is at least not as risky.

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Answer 6

WZZZ

Level 6

13,220 points

May 1, 2012 8:36 AM in response to WZZZ

I re-read and see you aren't backing up to the internal. However, you should know that WD My Books have a terrible reputation for reliability and many or most won't boot a Mac from a clone. I would be very wary of trusting my data with one. The drives are fine, but the chipsets in the enclosure are complete junk.

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Answer 7

May 1, 2012 3:48 PM in response to WZZZ

Good to get info re. WD enclosures. Thanks WZZZ.

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