Is it bad practice to have multiple partitions on 1 HDD?

[HDFan]

BTW...panics are often caused by RAM.

Thanks. I've run multiple passes of Techtool Pro memory tests. It hasn't found any problems, but that doesn't mean that they aren't there.

Although this is a side topic, I think I have isolated the BridgeOS panic error 210. It occurs randomly when I access one particular external RAID array. It does not occur if the device is off. I'm in the process of rebuilding the array to confirm that it was the problem.

 

[Fishrrman]

"There are people still using hard drives?"

I have hard drives 10 or 15 years old that I still use. Perhaps one or two even older.

I store old movies on an IDE drive mounted in a USB2 enclosure.
Works well enough.

 

[MacBH928]

1) No more so than disk partitions. Treat them the same way.

2) You haven't stated so far that anything other than Macs were being backed up.

3) Shouldn't be any strain at all. Make the disk-image a sparsebundle, and it should be fine.

4) They aren't, but they can easily be cloned to a bootable disk, using an app like Carbon Copy Cloner, or Disk Utility's "Restore" action.


If non-Macs are really part of the mix, and the disk partitions really need to be bootable on those non-Macs, then you should be certain that a partitioned GPT disk will be bootable for those computers.

How do I create a sparsebundle and why should I? All I know is how to make disk image from disk utility and there seems no option for sparse bundle or sparse image.

I know what files are and I know what disk partitions are, but I never understood what disk images are.
I can plug in a MAC OS hdd in windows(or even linux from what I understand) and it will read all the files, can you unmount a MAC OS disk image in Windows and retrieve the files all the same?

There are people still using hard drives?

1)I trust HDDs more than SSDs. I feel the SSDs on the market are made cheaply to lower their price and you never know when they will die. HDDs on the other hand you kind of get an idea if there is or will be a mechanical failure.

2)For the price of 1TB SSD , you can buy 3 1TB HDDs making 3 copies instead of one which is safer. If one fails you still got 2 other copies. Huge convenience of a little speed drop.

3)You can safely erase an HDD with multiple rewrites with tools like DBAN, I was told this is not possible with SSDs. People who work in data recovery have their ways with SSDs. I am kind of paranoid. This is what I have been told.
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"There are people still using hard drives?"

I have hard drives 10 or 15 years old that I still use. Perhaps one or two even older.

I store old movies on an IDE drive mounted in a USB2 enclosure.
Works well enough.

what brand are they?

 

[chown33]

How do I create a sparsebundle and why should I? All I know is how to make disk image from disk utility and there seems no option for sparse bundle or sparse image.

Use Disk Utility.app to create a new disk image.

In the dialog that's presented where you name the disk image and pick its size and format, you can also pick the Image Format. One of the options is sparse bundle disk image.

I know what files are and I know what disk partitions are, but I never understood what disk images are.

It's a file or set of files that contains a file-system.

I can plug in a MAC OS hdd in windows(or even linux from what I understand) and it will read all the files, can you unmount a MAC OS disk image in Windows and retrieve the files all the same?

The ability to read a Mac HDD in Windows or Linux will depend on the HDD's format. For example, Window can't read HFS+ by default. HFS+ requires additional software. I don't know about APFS support on Windows at all.

A Mac disk image can't be mounted in Windows, AFAIK. It might be mountable in Linux, but I'm not sure. It's something worth googling.



At this point, you haven't posted a complete list of requirements. It would help everyone who is posting advice if you give a complete list of requirements for your intended backup plan. In particular, what other OSes do your backups need to be readable or writable on? By that I mean a list of Windows versions, like Win7 or Win8 or Win10. Simply saying "Windows" is too vague. Same thing for Linux.

 

[MacBH928]

Use Disk Utility.app to create a new disk image.

In the dialog that's presented where you name the disk image and pick its size and format, you can also pick the Image Format. One of the options is sparse bundle disk image.



It's a file or set of files that contains a file-system.




The ability to read a Mac HDD in Windows or Linux will depend on the HDD's format. For example, Window can't read HFS+ by default. HFS+ requires additional software. I don't know about APFS support on Windows at all.

A Mac disk image can't be mounted in Windows, AFAIK. It might be mountable in Linux, but I'm not sure. It's something worth googling.



At this point, you haven't posted a complete list of requirements. It would help everyone who is posting advice if you give a complete list of requirements for your intended backup plan. In particular, what other OSes do your backups need to be readable or writable on? By that I mean a list of Windows versions, like Win7 or Win8 or Win10. Simply saying "Windows" is too vague. Same thing for Linux.

Thanks for the help, all I need is to backup MAC OS computers but the earliest version being 10.9 and I need the backups to be accessed by any computer just in case.

Actually I have one with a Tiger backup but I don't need that to be bootable, just accessible. But thanks for the help here I know what to do now.