[G4] new hard drive issue

[Jim Pacyga]

Just as a point of interest - if you wanted to backup your whole 80Gb 
drive, the cost would not be all that great - check out 
http://pricewatch.com and you will see that 80 gb drives are not all 
that expensive anymore.  The price difference between a 20, 40 and 80 
is not all that significant.

On 11 Jun 2004, at 05:52, Joseph B. Gurman wrote:

>     Keith Whaley wrote:
>
>> Slightly different flavor of hard drive question, but I do need an 
>> answer...
>>
>> I have a 2002 Power Mac G4 tower, OS 10.2.8, 80 GB H.D.
>>
>> For backup purposes, I still need something to receive the data -- 
>> like
>> another H.D.
>> Since I only have something like 6 GB of total data on the existing 
>> H.D.
>> and the likelihood of ever surpassing even 10 GB is very slim, is it
>> feasible to back up what content/data I do have on a 20 or 40 or 60 
>> GB H.D.?
>> Or must the receiving H.D. be at least as big as the drive being 
>> backed up?
>>
>> I don't particularly care about the cost of the new B.U. H.D., but if 
>> I
>> need to look for a H.D. that has at least as large as 80 GB, I need to
>> know that going in...
>
> and Jesper Bylund answered:
>
>> No. The backup drive only have to be as big as the data you want to
>> backup. The same thinking as with iDisk: If you have 100MB space you
>> will be able to backup 100MB of data.
>
>     Well, maybe; it depends on what sort of backup you want/use. If 
> you use something (e.g. ditto or psync) that simply images the disk as 
> it is today, all you need is the volume currently in use. If you use 
> an incremental backup application (such as Retrospect), it allows you 
> to access an image of however your disk looked on any backup date 
> since you began backing up --- so you'll presumably need more space 
> than is used on your current hard drive. How much more depends on how 
> much "thrash" there is in your files --- do they change a lot from day 
> to day, while maintaining about the same total number of blocks, or 
> are they pretty much the same things --- and on whether you back up 
> useless files such as browser cache files.
>
>     And finally, a holdover from the days when disk drives were too 
> expensive to be given away as prizes in Crackerjacks packages, some 
> backup software will allow you to compress the backup image (in 
> software, and thus with a performance hit), so you might need _less_ 
> space than you use on your current drive.
>
>     There: I made a simple answer complicated. Just like real life, 
> except for politicians.
>
> 						Joe Gurman
> -- 
> "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by."
>                                                             - Douglas 
> Adams, 1952 - 2001
>
> Joseph B. Gurman, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Solar Physics
> Branch, Greenbelt MD 20771 USA
>
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