New OWC 500GB firewire Drive - where to start?

[djlynch]

As a newbie, I have read the forums and think I know just enough to be dangerous.

Here is what I want to do. Create a fully bootable clone of my imac AND have an Aperture "Vault" for my photos that I have in aperture.

I seem to understand that a separate partition makes sense for this. Would it be wise to have 2,3,4 or how many partitions? Why partition at all?

I want to have my "digital life" on the external drive...itunes music, aperture pics, imovie movies etc.

Thanks for the help and looking forward to really being "smart" with my backups!:)

[dnanian]

You'll need two, one for your internal drive, and one for your external vault.

[djlynch]

You'll need two, one for your internal drive, and one for your external vault.

Thanks for the quick reply! can itunes read from a partition on an external drive?

[dnanian]

Sure. You just have to tell it that's where your library is.

[djlynch]

Sure. You just have to tell it that's where your library is.

What are your thoughts on using a service like Mozy for JUST photos,movies,music in addition of course to an external drive or 2 with Super Duper bootable clone?

[dnanian]

As long as you understand how it works and what it does, I think it's a good service.

[BackupFan]

While Mozy is a great service for pure online backups, may I suggest you try Phanfare (http://www.phanfare.com) for archiving photos and videos.

I started using Phanfare a couple of weeks ago when I realized I really needed to get my backups off site. Not only does Phanfare support the full archival of photos (up to 20MBs each) and videos (10mins or 2GBs), you have full access to actually VIEW them! Mozy can't give you that type of access. Phanfare also has multiple back up locations and one of those locations is Amazon S3.

You can then share all your photos and videos with family members or not. The service allows for very good security controls.

The pricing is very reasonable at $55/year or $299 once for a lifetime account.

As someone who is very much into backing up my files either through SuperDuper (which is used for my daily backups to redundant external storage) and Mozy for pure online archival, Phanfare was a great service that could do both. Archival of all my digital photos and videos while still being able to view them.

[djlynch]

While Mozy is a great service for pure online backups, may I suggest you try Phanfare (http://www.phanfare.com) for archiving photos and videos.

I started using Phanfare a couple of weeks ago when I realized I really needed to get my backups off site. Not only does Phanfare support the full archival of photos (up to 20MBs each) and videos (10mins or 2GBs), you have full access to actually VIEW them! Mozy can't give you that type of access. Phanfare also has multiple back up locations and one of those locations is Amazon S3.

You can then share all your photos and videos with family members or not. The service allows for very good security controls.

The pricing is very reasonable at $55/year or $299 once for a lifetime account.

As someone who is very much into backing up my files either through SuperDuper (which is used for my daily backups to redundant external storage) and Mozy for pure online archival, Phanfare was a great service that could do both. Archival of all my digital photos and videos while still being able to view them.

Thanks! I will check it out. Sounds great. Do you know if it supports RAW file format or just JPEG?

[BackupFan]

Sadly they don't support RAW at this time. They do support PSD (single layer), TIFF, JPEG, and other web formats.

I was really drawn to the service due to their impressive video support. Being able to archive my family videos that are usually less than 10 minutes (I find my folks don't have the patience to watch the kids for more than 10 minutes on TV anyway) is awesome. Plus, I'm actually able to secure them from the YouTube public and their quality is excellent. They'll archive up to a 4Mbit (DVD quality) version and then display 1Mbit currently online.

http://support.phanfare.com/doc/Supported_file_types for information regarding file type support.

Their support is also pretty excellent with fast turn around times on email and they have an online forum.

[djlynch]

That's still okay. i will just backup my Aperture RAW files to external using SD than upload to a site like Phanfare...i like the idea of storing videos also!