Need suggestions portioning network drives...

[gpspad]

I am new to portioning mac hd's and was wondering if this is possible.

I am trying to setup a back-up schedule with CCC. The new plan is to have a WD 8TB external drive attached to a headless mac running OS X server. It should always be on. I am going to have CCC running on each network mac to backup to a different portion I created on the 8TB drive. Should I ever need to recover a mac, I will use CCC to clone the backup partition to a external usb hd and restore from there.

My question is will I be able to grow and shrink these partitions as the mac backups get bigger?

I partitioned the 8TB drive with the OS X disk utility, and any unused disk space is automatically put into one big drive. I am getting the feeling I can't do the same things with OS X I can do on windows machines.

It seems like a wast to partition all the backup volumes to big sizes, and never end have CCC backups that use all the space.

Any suggestions appreciated....

 

[DJLC]

I would stick with one partition and have CCC backup each machine to its own disk image on the file share. AFAIK, you cannot automatically resize a partition, although I believe you can resize them manually.

 

[gpspad]

I am working on this a piece at a time. I decided to portion off the WD 8TB, CCC allows the mac to login remotely to the mac mini server and backup to the individual volumes.

My next step is to figure out how to backup to an image file, then restore the image file to an external usb drive.

Once I have that figured out I can create image files on the NAS server and copy those files to an external hard drive I can keep off site.

Its one thing to buy a big 8TB hard drive, its a whole other thing to keep everything backup.

 

[Mikael H]

+1 on going for a single partition (but possibly different shares), and storing backups in disk images instead. Partitioning has a place, but in general it creates more long-term planning issues than it solves.