What size should the partition be?

[cjedj]

I'm painfully aware this is probably a dumb newbie question, but I'll ask it anyway!

I'm going to be doing my first backup using SD later, to a brand new external Firewire Lacie Drive. I want to partition the Lacie drive and clone my system to one of the partitions so I have an external boot volume.

The question is - does the partition need to be any bigger than the size of my original HD, in order to allow room for the program to "work"? Or if my original HD is for example 100GB, then can the partition on the external Lacie drive also be set to 100GB only?

Thanks in advance :)

[dnanian]

100GB is usually sufficient... unless you're running with huge files really close to full on the source. (See the Troubleshooting section of the User's guide for a discussion.)

[cjedj]

Thanks for such a quick response Dave, that's really great :)