Newbie: b/u 2 Macs and an external drive?

[Theophan]

I downloaded SuperDuper yesterday, have gone through the manual, am not sure I understand whether it can do what I want. I hope that experienced users here may know and be willing to help me.

I have 2 Macs (mine and my wife's), both running latest Leopard, with a wireless Time Capsule and another external drive firewired to one of the Macs. The firewire drive contains video files I have no room for on my small MacBook Pro drive, so at present, there's no b/u of the video files. Also, I've been concerned that my Time Capsule is in the same house as the computers, so if there were a catastrophe in the house, both computers and b/u might be gone.

So I just bought a little Passport 320 GB drive and downloaded SuperDuper, but I can't figure out whether it will do what I hope:

1) Bootable b/u of the MacBook Pro INCLUDING the external firewire drive's data. (It looks like SuperDuper is set up to b/u one disk at a time.)

2) I'm also hoping that in addition to (1), SuperDuper will also make scheduled b/u of the external firewire drive to the wireless Time Capsule, without interfering with the files from Time Machine.

3) I doubt that this will work, but thought I'd ask: Is it possible to do (1) and then hook the Passport to another Mac and b/u user files, or will that mess up the bootable b/u of the first Mac?

Many thanks!

Theophan

[dnanian]

Well, if you want to back up three drives (2 internal, 1 FW), you'll need to create three partitions on the backup drive with Disk Utility -- you'll want to use the "GUID" partition scheme.

You'll then direct each source volume to its corresponding destination, using "Backup - all files" with Smart Update, except where you only want to do user files, in which case you'll use "Backup - user files".

You can then back up all three volumes to images on your Time Capsule -- see "Backing up over a network" in the User's Guide, and the "Airport Disks" post at the Shirt Pocket blog.

[Theophan]

Well, if you want to back up three drives (2 internal, 1 FW), you'll need to create three partitions on the backup drive... then direct each source volume to its corresponding destination, using "Backup - all files" with Smart Update... You can then back up all three volumes to images on your Time Capsule -- see "Backing up over a network" in the User's Guide, and the "Airport Disks" post at the Shirt Pocket blog.

Thanks! I was thinking so hard about one backup that included two drives that it just hadn't occurred to me to partition the Passport disk and do two completely separate backups in different partitions.

I'll look for that listing on the blog about Time Capsule. I assume you mean I'd need to repartition Time Capsule as well? Time Machine seems to be working fine putting its b/u of two different Macs in the same partition, but I'd love to have SuperDuper add a b/u of that one external (firewire) drive, so I'm guessing I'd need to add a second partition to the Time Capsule disk for that. I'll look for more information where you suggested and if I'm still clueless, I'll come back here.

Thanks again!

Theophan

[dnanian]

No, you wouldn't partition the time capsule, because you have to back to images over the network.

[sparkchaser]

What about using mac mini powerpc as pseudo-time capsule backup device but compatible with my new intel macbook running Leopard and my intel mac mini running Tiger? My first experience with Time Machine was less than optimal, accidently writing over my Bootcamp partition on the macbook, and totally ignoring the external usb drive that was too small. Also, all 3 macs have 80Gig harddrives. I know I won't be able to clone everything, but need to backup all document directories and a few downloaded programs. I can reinstall OS-X from its original disks