Wanting to get it right (seeking backup advice)

[Nee]

I have a two year old Mac PowerPC that has 232.76 GB capacity with 31.72 GB of it currenty being used. I recently bought a LaCie 500 GB d2 Quadra external hard drive to store a bootable duplicate of my hard drive and for easy storage of backups. I bought SuperDuper and the LaCie hard drive before I upgraded to Leopard X and I presently have a bootable backup of Tiger on the LaCie.

I have lots of photos, short home movies and general files that I would like to backup. But, I also have creative project files (graphic designs, illustrations & photo mockups etc...) that I make lots of changes to and would like to keep a few versions of to work with.

Is Time Machine the most logical solution for my backups, along with a SuperDuper bootable duplicate or could I set up SuperDuper to handle my backups too. (I should mention Retrospect Express 6.1 & Silverlining backup software were also included with my LaCie drive but I don't know much about them.)

Also, I know I need to partition my external drive to separate my bootable duplicate from my general storage, but should I partition the drive so they each have the same amount of space? Can I also store my MacBookpro (it has Leopard X OS too) backups to this external drive with a partition even though the LaCie is listed as a "desktop external drive"?

Thank you for your help!

Janeen

[dnanian]

I'd partition your drive into one partition for SD! (the size of this is up to you, but if you've only used 31GB over two years, I'd suggest that 100GB is fine) and the rest for Time Machine, then use both of them.

[Nee]

Thanks Dave, I will try it! Janeen

[TMay]

Janeen

About your other question, your second Mac, yes, you can also back it up to the same harddrive with SuperDuper. Note you will then need another partition, your third in this example, for it.

Although you can backup the MacbookPro, that backup volume (partition) will have all your data but will not be bootable. (Intels and PowerPC's require different partition formats, and an entire physical hard disk must have only one of the two.) Your LaCie currently has the correct one (called APM) for PowerPC's.

[Nee]

TMay

Thanks for the info about my Macbook. It's still fairly new so I don't have any real important files on it yet...I've been using a 2 GB thumb drive to shuttle a couple of important files between the Macbook and the PowerPC.

Unfortunately, I already partitioned my LaCie into 2 volumes so, if I partition it again to include a third volume, I'll loose everything that I backed up so far. I'll probably get an external hard drive just for the Macbook Pro so that I can have a bootable clone along with storage. Thanks.

Janeen