Power PC 10.5.8, Leopard. Going to purchse new Mac but first want to download most info to external hard drive; do not know if 1PB Drive is large enough. I have Time Machine.
Do a 'get info' on your hard drive to see how much has been used.
Some of this will be caches etc and will not need to be backed up.
I would use Carbon Copy Cloner and clone the whole hard drive to either an empty external drive or to a disk image if the drive has something on it.
Neville: I have used 67.32 GB out of 74.41 GB. Yes, my compute is very old but still working; though more slowly now. I have almost 2000 photos and 2,387 songs or 4.42 GB on it. So, I will be buying an external hard drive but will 1 TB be enough or will I need to go higher. I have researced those that are MAC compatable so I do hope that it is not too difficult.
You have confused me.
I thought you were asking how big the external should be to back up your existing Mac.
Clearly 100 GB would be adequate for this purpose.
1 TB = 1000 GB. So the external you are considering will be fine as a Time Machine backup.
This should be my last response so thanks for the help. I guess that I really did not make myself clear in the beginning. I had asked about an external hard drive for the following reasons.
1. I will purchase a new Mac
2. I want to download most of what I now have on my old Mac to a hard drive.
3. I will bring that hard drive to the Apple Store where, with help, we will transfer to the new computer.
4. I will continue to use this same hard drive with my new computer. Since this hard drive will serve a duel purpose I was concerned about how much information it could hold, now and in the future.
5. Today, I plan to purchase a 2 TB hard drive that is Mac formatted with a USB 3.0. & I hope that everything works out.
Not helped by your question:
"do not know if 1PB Drive is large enough"
A 1PB Drive is 500 times the capacity of the one you intend to purchase and I doubt that such large drives are available.
External Hard Drive
