help with setting up new external hard drive

[Okvalleyguy]

I have purchased the Iomega Black Series 250 GB Firewire/Usb hard drive. I want to do a full back up from my iBook 30 GB HD. I also want to be able to store tunes /pictures and other big stuff so the iBook is not jammed all the time.
I am confused as to what to do ?, what software should i use ?
It is sitting on my kitchen table and i am scared to plug it in.
Any help or ideas on what you think would get it off the table and plugged in.
I will be only using it for Mac so know that i have to re format it to
HFS after it was shipped with Fat32
i am a newly converted mac guy and do appreciate this form for the help and the friendship that goes with Apple, cheers..
any ideas on how to make this easy for a simple kinda guy would be helpful.
Should i do a full back up then clean my laptop hard drive and start fresh.
and if so how? cheers friend

 

[deebster]

I’m doing this from memory as I’m stuck on my awful work PC at the moment, so I might not be 100% accurate...

Plug the drive in to your Mac’s firewire port and turn it on. You should see it appear on your desktop and in the Finder (it should have an orange firewire icon).

Launch Disk Utility app (in your Applications > Utilities folder) and select the drive in the panel on the left. Then click on the Erase tab (or is it Partition? Have a look around and you’ll get the right one). What you want to do is erase and reformat the external in HFS+ mode, which Disk Utility will call ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)' I think.

You might also want to create separate partitions on the external drive, say one the same size as your iBook (for backup purposes), one for storage and maybe one spare for whatever you want. Use the slider to get the sizes how you want them and give each partition a name.

There is some form of OK or Partition button to tell Disk Utility to go to work on your drive. It shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to do its stuff.

And that’s really it. You now have an external firewire drive.

Use CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper! to clone your iBook’s HD to the external. CCC is donationware, plus it is very easy to use. SD is shareware, does more, but might be a bit confusing the first few times you use it.

The clone will take a while the first time but after that make sure you delve into CCC’s or SD’s preferences and choose to do an incremental backup in the future. This will then only copy the data that has changed when you next do a clone, which is much faster.

There are more things you can do later on but for now that should get you going.

Good luck mate, and enjoy all that extra HD space.

 

[student_trap]

the tab to click on in disk utility is 'partition' in order to set partitions set a partition of 30gigs for your backup, and split the rest as you wish.

as for software, in recommend superduper! as its really easy to use and works wonders

 

[Okvalleyguy]

I’m doing this from memory as I’m stuck on my awful work PC at the moment, so I might not be 100% accurate...

Plug the drive in to your Mac’s firewire port and turn it on. You should see it appear on your desktop and in the Finder (it should have an orange firewire icon).

Launch Disk Utility app (in your Applications > Utilities folder) and select the drive in the panel on the left. Then click on the Erase tab (or is it Partition? Have a look around and you’ll get the right one). What you want to do is erase and reformat the external in HFS+ mode, which Disk Utility will call ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)' I think.

You might also want to create separate partitions on the external drive, say one the same size as your iBook (for backup purposes), one for storage and maybe one spare for whatever you want. Use the slider to get the sizes how you want them and give each partition a name.

There is some form of OK or Partition button to tell Disk Utility to go to work on your drive. It shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to do its stuff.

And that’s really it. You now have an external firewire drive.

Use CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper! to clone your iBook’s HD to the external. CCC is donationware, plus it is very easy to use. SD is shareware, does more, but might be a bit confusing the first few times you use it.

The clone will take a while the first time but after that make sure you delve into CCC’s or SD’s preferences and choose to do an incremental backup in the future. This will then only copy the data that has changed when you next do a clone, which is much faster.

There are more things you can do later on but for now that should get you going.

Good luck mate, and enjoy all that extra HD space.

BIG THANKS for your help and ideas. I just found out there is a Mac user group meeting tonight so i will attend for the first time and re format in the morning..
Thanks for being very kind, cheers