Newbie dumb questions

[MacAfrican]

I'm new to the Mac world and just downloaded SD (10.4.7 doesn't work so well with my Canon utilities and now I hear I should have gotten SD long ago...)

B4 I start, some basic tips please?

Q1: Can I use a second internal disk to backup/clone to? I know it's not a safe place, but thought it'd be fast and I will also backup to an external on longer cycles.
Q1A: If yes, should I set up a partition on my external disk and clone to that partition? My second disk already has stuff on it, but data only so not stuff that I'll need to do a system recovery.

Q2: would I be better off with two physically seperate firewire disks of say 250 each or one huge external firewire? I'd like to keep a weekly copy, a month-end copy and a copy of the month-end before that one (i.e 30 June, 31 May and a Sunday weekly)

Thank you, and I am am printing the manual to start reading. Promise

[dnanian]

While you can use an internal disk to copy to, it's generally better to use an external drive that you can easily rotate/put away/turn off/etc.

More physical redundancy is better than less. So, I'd suggest two external drive rather than one partitioned one.

[MacAfrican]

thank you, just reading the manual actually worked (for a change :) )

I'm setting up an 80 Mb partition on my second internal on which I'll do my weeklies and then I'll do my monthly on an external firewire.

Q1: For that external, should I partition it so that I then get a partition on which I backup the main system stuff and which is bootable, and then a second partition onto which I backup my data files like pictures & video?

Q2: How do I figure out the size of these partitions? I presume the backup is going to backup the whole shooting match (OS, installed applications, etc). Does SD backup my whole primary disk (which is presently set up with a system partition, font partition and a third partition onto which I install applications), or will it backup system only?

[dnanian]

If you want to store things other than a backup on the external, you should definitely partition it. Each partition corresponds to a single source, so if you have three source partitions you'll want four destination ones (the extra one for your other storage).

The general size requirements are that the source and destination partitions should be the same size. But, if you're never going to go over 50GB on one partition, you need not allocate 200GB for it on the backup. Just leave plenty of space, especially if you're going to start up from one: the OS needs space for its own use.

[MacAfrican]

ran my first backups and immediately upgraded to the purchases version of the software. Good work guys, tested the clone boot and works perfect.

one suggestion : any particular reason why you must select a drive to backup to a drive? I'd have liked to select my system drive as well as my applications drive and have both backed up, or even be able to exclude some stuff on system (e.g the non-critical stuff like music that ends up in my user folders).

Now that i have the full version I must read the manual some more, maybe I can figure this out for myself.

repeat: nice to find software that works first time and lives up to its promo - will be recommending it!

[dnanian]

Glad you like it!

We copy volume-to-volume, one at a time. It's the way we're designed. You can schedule any number of backups, using any number of scripts, from any number of volumes, even all for the same time: we'll take care of the details.

Please do read the manual before you start excluding, etc! :)