Using SuperDuper with a 500 Gb MyBook
 

Hello there, I am planning on upgrading my MacBook to Leopard. Before I do this I thought that I would use SuperDuper to backup everything. I have a 500 Gb MyBook External Firewire hard drive. Now I have been putting things on here like all my music, full dvd movies, and photos. But now SuperDuper is telling me that I need to reconfigure the hard drive in order to make a backup. Can I do this without deleting everything? Or do I need to back everything up from the hard drive? Backing up everything would be a little more of a hassle but not too bad. Anyone now what I could do? Thanks!

You're best off partitioning the drive and storing your backup on its own partition. See "Storing a backup alongside other files on a destination drive" in the User's Guide (Help > User's Guide)...

Is that reliable? Is there a way to actually partition the MyBook and then configuring that as needed?

Yes, you can partition the iBook with data on it using iPartition, from Coriolis Systems.

...which, by the way, is a brilliant app. I purchased a license on the same day I bought SuperDuper!, which I believe was the day after I got my Mac (allowing for research 'n' reading reviews 'n' such!). =)

iPartition 3 was recently released, is Leopard-compatible, and works great. It even deals with Boot Camp partitions without having a coronary.

Just one thing: partitioning a drive non-destructively means moving all that data around. If you've got a bunch of stuff on that 500GB drive, expect the process of creating a new partition with iPartition to take a while. I tried it on a 500GB drive that had about 250GB of data on it, and ages later, I thought it had stalled so I aborted it. When it wouldn't abort, I force-quit the app. Those are both really bad ideas. So don't be impatient like me, just let it do its thing and go to sleep. =)