Back Me Up On This, Would Ya?

April 3, 2011 5:01 PM

I have two external hard drives: one Mac formatted (WD 500 GB); one Windows (Iomega 1 TB). I have a Macbook and a lot of music. Let's get all this together and end up with a setup that does what I want.

I have two external hard drives: one Mac formatted (WD 500 GB); one Windows (Iomega 1 TB). I have a Macbook and a lot of music. Let's get all this together and end up with a setup that does what I want.

I have an old PC (WinXP) and a Macbook Pro. All the PC has done for a long while is hold my music (about 107GB), which I Home Share to Macbook and iPhones via iTunes. I have 2 external drives, one Mac and one Win. They currently contain different info (a Mac Time Machine backup on the Mac formatted, and a recent backup copy of all the iTunes on the Win formatted). I want to end up getting rid of the PC, having Macbook only, with my music on an external HDD, and another external HDD as backup.

My challenges:

a) How would you make the 2 HDDs identical? (Hook both to Mac and copy from Win HDD to Mac HDD? Then Mac format the Win and copy back?)

b) Or, should I even do that? Should the 500 GB drive hold music only, and the 1 TB be more of a traditional backup, archiving the Macbook drive and the external drive (getting music and other docs)? How would I do that backup to catch both sources? (Backup will be stored outside the home.)

c) I want to keep all the iTunes material on the external HDD only, not allowing iTunes to "manage" it on the local HDD on the Macbook. (ease of transfer to any new comp, as well as preserving local HDD space). I am aware that my music would be unavailable when I am away from the external HDD. If there is anything I want badly enough, I will copy it over temporarily.

d) I would consider cloud backup, but it would have to be about 200 GB for just the music, plus family pics, etc. And, I still need all the tunes to be on external. My Macbook Pro has only 160 GB hard drive.

My own brain is tired of figuring on this. I don't know what I don't know, and things could be easier (or worse) than I am imagining. Thank you so much, in advance.

posted by skypieces to computers & internet (6 answers total)

This is easy.

1) Format the 1 TB drive to HFS (Mac OS Extended Journaled).
2) Download Carbon Copy Cloner
3) Configure it to backup your MBP startup disk as a bootable volume on the 1 TB drive.
4) Use the "clone to a subfolder" feature to also backup the other drive.
5) Profit!

For more details, see the appropriate section from the CCC people: "I want to back up my startup disk and a data volume to the same backup disk".
posted by drpynchon at 5:09 PM on April 3, 2011

The 1 TB drive is currently Win formatted; no problem reformatting. Except... how do I keep the 160GB of music I have on it already? Can I bounce the contents of the 1 TB to the 500 GB (Mac formatted)? Then, reformat and set it all up?

Once I get this all sorted, I do like what I see from CCC.
posted by skypieces at 5:39 PM on April 3, 2011

>Can I bounce the contents of the 1 TB to the 500 GB

Should be able to. Mac OS X should be able to read NTFS out of the box, so you should be able to just plug the 1TB into the MacBook along with the 500GB and drag the music directory over.
posted by chazlarson at 5:54 PM on April 3, 2011

Yup, what chaz said. The Mac will have no trouble recognizing that drive. Just move the data you want to keep over to where you want to keep it (assume the other external drive since its music) and off you go.

CCC is a downright awesome program. I happily said goodbye to TimeMachine and never looked back once I could do incremental backups to bootable volumes with it.
posted by drpynchon at 7:11 AM on April 4, 2011

Seconding drpynchon, but for day-to-day backups, take a look at arrsync -- http://arrsync.sourceforge.net/

You may have to lose your current TM backup data in the process of moving stuff around -- CCCloner will not clone a TM drive because TM uses hard-coded links.

Re challenge b) I'd go with "500 GB drive hold music only, and the 1 TB be more of a traditional backup"

Re challenge c) if you run itunes without the external HD connected, itunes will create a new library on your laptop's HD. Libra -- http://www.sillybit.com/libra/ -- will be useful so that you can switch back & forth between the two libraries.
posted by omnidrew at 7:16 AM on April 4, 2011

Thanks to all. This makes sense. Eager to try out CCC and Libra. Have decided to purchase another new 1 TB Iomega before starting (which I will format HFS). This WD is a piece of crap.

Will leave this open for a couple of days in case other suggestions arrive. Beyond that, thank you.
posted by skypieces at 11:07 AM on April 4, 2011