Can sandbox share a partition with other data?

[jotaro]

I'm using superduper for the first time to backup the original hard drive and to create a sandbox and at least one on-going sparse image. I have a new iMac intel with 250 mg hard drive. My external drive is a WD my book pro 500.

My plan was to split the external drive into two partitions, one devoted to the on-going clone of the original hard drive, the other devoted to the sandbox, a sparse image and some miscellaneous files. I want to avoid partitioning the second half of the external hard drive further. I read somewhere that partitioning drives on a Mac should be kept to a bare minimum.

However, the superduper manual raised an issue that isn't totally clear to me. The issue is, must I create yet another partition on the external drive devoted solely to the sandbox? Even if there were a way to create a sandbox on a partition that contains other files, would I be flirting with danger somewhere down the road in trying to boot from the sandbox or in trying to copy back from the sandbox?

jotaro

[dnanian]

A Sandbox needs to be on its own partition, jotaro, if you want to make use of it. You can't store it alongside other files.

[blind_melon]

I have just bought a macbook pro with a 100 GB drive. I want to backup from the very start and I would like to create an internal partition for my sandbox. In the Super Duper instructions it says that the Sandbox partition should be between 10 ang 15 GB or 25% of my drive. How big should it actually be? Should I allocate 25GB for ir or would 15GB? Can iPartition help me if I were to regret about the sizes afterwards?

[dnanian]

Before you partition, create a sandbox on the full drive to see how large yours ends up being. Note that some files in /Library (Garage Band, iWeb, iDVD) can be quite large, and aren't shared by default, so they take up extra space. If you want to share them you can do so -- see the User's Guide for the technique to use (there's an advanced example that shows how to share additional files).

[blind_melon]

I can't create the Sandbox because I have not yet paid for my Super Duper. Before doing so I would like to be certain about the partition procedure. As I said, my mac book prof is brand new and I have not got more that 5 GB of media myself. Since I will be backing up from the start I would like to use my Sandbox from the very start as well. 10, 15, 20 or 25GB? How will my choice of size affect my use of the computer? Im a new begginer with all this stuff and I just need a number!

[dnanian]

If I could give you a figure, I would. Due to different software bundles on these various Macs, it's difficult to say. But, as I indicated, you can share more data to reduce the size of the Sandbox. As such, ABOUT 20GB should be enough -- ASSUMING that you make some modifications to the script to share more data as described in the User's Guide.