Setting up a new backup system

[Journeyman]

Hi Dave,

I'm getting to ready to put together my backup system. (Mac Dual G5 PPC with a 233 gig hard drive, OS 10.4.10.) I'm thinking that I'll go with a system centered around SuperDuper, and a Firewire External Drive. I was thinking that I would go with a one terrabite drive, so as to have bootable backups of the last 4 days of work. But that raises some questions:

1. Would I need to have four different partitions; one for each day? Or if I don't partition the drive, would SuperDuper know to keep 4 bootable backups, always deleting the oldest backup? And if I did go with 4 partitions, would Superduper be able to "know" which partition to use on a given day, always deleting the oldest of the 4 partitions?

2. In my case, is a one terrabite HD a smart way to go?

3. I've read somewhere that cloned drives create "unusable free space" on the destination drive, and that concerns me. If I go with the aforementioned one terrabite backup drive, would the "unusable free space" issue prevent me from having enough available space for four days of backups?

Thanks in advance for all your help!

[dnanian]

Yes, you'd definitely want four partitions. Whether doing it all on one drive is 'smart' is arguable: I prefer to have some physical redundancy when doing multiple backups, since a drive failure would take out all four of your backups.

I have no idea what they're talking about with "unusable free space".