I'm thinking of getting an external hard drive, but first I have a few questions (I'm sure these are very easy for anyone with an external hard drive to answer):
1. Why would I want the external hard drive to be bootable?
2. If I don't care if it's bootable, is there much advantage to getting firewire? (e.g. are file transfers noticeably faster than USB 2.0?)
3. If I make a bootable hard drive (with SuperDuper), can I still put other stuff on the hard drive? (I have an 80 gig hard drive right now and I am thinking of getting a 250 gig external hard drive, so I want to be able to store large movies or whatnot exclusively on the external) And if I do put something extra on the external hard drive, will it get erased if I update my backup?
Oh, I just had an idea, I could partition the external hard drive to make a section just over 80 gigs, and then leftover space. I could have one half exclusively for backups, and the other half for other stuff. Comments?
I'm thinking of getting an external hard drive, but first I have a few questions (I'm sure these are very easy for anyone with an external hard drive to answer):
1. Why would I want the external hard drive to be bootable?
2. If I don't care if it's bootable, is there much advantage to getting firewire? (e.g. are file transfers noticeably faster than USB 2.0?)
3. If I make a bootable hard drive (with SuperDuper), can I still put other stuff on the hard drive? (I have an 80 gig hard drive right now and I am thinking of getting a 250 gig external hard drive, so I want to be able to store large movies or whatnot exclusively on the external) And if I do put something extra on the external hard drive, will it get erased if I update my backup?
Oh, I just had an idea, I could partition the external hard drive to make a section just over 80 gigs, and then leftover space. I could have one half exclusively for backups, and the other half for other stuff. Comments?
1. With a bootable external drive you can run various disk utilities on you internal that you can't run normally. Also useful to trouble shoot sys problems
2. Unless your using it daily and continually working off of it, a USB2 drive is fine. but if your doing sound or video editing on it get a Firewire drive.
3. Sorry. I'm not familiar with SuperDuper. But I do believe you can and if should not get erased. I think.
You can even partition the 250 GB external drive and backup incrementally, say backup once this week to one partition and then next week to a different one, so you have rolling backups and can easily restore from either last week or the week before.
Remember too that a 250 GB hard drive will only have about 232 GB of usable space on it.
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