On my mac I have a 500 GB hard drive. I had been using the drive to both store a clone of my hard drive and my files of my digital life. This drive is a FireWire 800 drive and it is blazing fast for a bus powered external drive. The problem I’ve been having is backing up just my digital files that exist on the drive with my clone. After the Break, I will tell you my solution and how to achieve it on your own.
The magic is done by using disk utilities that come with the OSX version you are using. You’re going to have to partition the drive, and disk utilities does destructive partitioning, which means you will need to move any files from the drive you are about to partition. If you want to do this, you might want to get a new bus powered drive.
The next thing you want to do is to do the partitioning. The Drive will need to be formatted in the proper manner for allowing the drive to be bootable. Plug in your drive to your Mac. Start the Disk Utility located in the utilities folders in application on your Mac. Select your portable hard drive. Click on the Partitions hard drive. Select the number of partitions you want on this drive from the volume scheme drop down.
You’ll notice in this screen shot that I have a small partition and a large one. The large partition is where I will be placing my media and other files. The smaller partition is just slightly larger than my hard drive on the MacBook Pro. To adjust the size of each partition you can slide the divider between the partitions.
Once you’ve got the scheme you want and made sure the drive is being formatted to allow booting which is in the options on the partition page, then you can click apply. The utility will make the drive conform to your partition scheme. Now you need to clone your computer’s main drive.
Everyone has their favorite cloning and back up software. My two favorites are Chronosync and Carbon Copy Cloner. Both get the job done. Choose which ever one you like. The first clone is going to take some time, so schedule it when you can let the computer do its thing and you don’t need it. Once the first clone is completed, the other operations will be differential cloning, either adding or removing files. The direction of the clone is always from your computer’s drive to the external drive.
Scheduling is also up to you. If you got Time machine going on your computer, then you might be able to get away with once a week cloning. Just do it. You can boot from this clone so, your computer will have max availability. Just don’t forget to back up the other partitions on a regular basis.
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