[P1] External HD setup

[david]

On 9/13/03 11:26 AM, "Brian Olesky" <brian4 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> A few weeks ago I got a new external hard drive, downloaded Carbon Copy
> Cloner, and copied the contents of my internal drive onto the external
> drive. However, I've since read (on this list and in a MacWorld article)
> that I was supposed to format the new drive first. Although it seems to be
> working okay anyway, is that something I need to go back and do with the
> disk utility software? Could not having formatted it be the reason that
> Carbon Copy Cloner seems to hang up a lot when I use it? Are there any other
> issues involved in not pre-formatting the external drive? And if I go back
> and format it now, are there any advantages to having partitions? All I
> really want the drive for is to have a backup of my stuff, and to store some
> seldom used files that are threatening to outgrow my internal 20 gig hard
> drive.
>
The external drive mounted so it was obviously formatted. I think the issue
about formatting is to make sure the drive is empty before using CCC. I
maintain a lab of OS X machines and I used CCC to roll out Jaguar and a host
of updates before the semester began. On my first attempt to clone to the
external firewire, CCC froze. I decided it might be a memory leak so I
copied the drive in two passes rather than one. That worked and I did the
same when I copied that clone to my 29 other machines. Four times during the
day CCC froze during the process of copying the clone to the other machines.
I think it is just the nature of the beast. I'm now evaluating commercial
software for cloning since, besides freezing, CCC is also quite slow.

If you are just backing up (as opposed to cloning a bootable drive) give
Deja Vu a look. It is configured using a system preference pane and can be
set up to copy any folder to another location - including a CD or DVD. You
can create manual backups but it also allows daily, weekly, and monthly
scheduled backups at a specific time. I use it now on both my iBook and
desktop for backing up data.

david

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davidwb at spymac.com