Help me partition my Titanic Backup External Drive

[Acer]

To compensate for other shortcomings, I have purchased a 2 TB hard drive and installed it in an external case (a NewerTech Ministack 2.5). It will be mainly a Time Machine site, with some additional offloaded files (not a lot), and accessed via network on my Airport Extreme Base Station (attached to the AEBS by USB). It replaces a 200Gb drive in the same setup that is no longer big enough with two 'books backing up to it.

How would you partition it?

Choices I can think of:
1. One partition. KISS principle.
2. Two equal partitions, with Carbon Copy Cloner or some such duping one side to the other
3. Mirrored RAID...though I've not been sold on these, since a corrupted file just gets copied over right away with no chance to intercept it.
4. Some other config that young folks use these days...

Thoughts?

[Filliam H. Muffman]

Mirrored RAID on a single drive? Good way to waste space and cut performance in half. :confused:

[sekker]

I would partition as follows:

1) 1 partition for each time machine backup.

2) 1 partition to allow you to clone your machine

3) 1 scratch partition

[Paul F.]

I thought doing a Mirrored Raid on a single drive was like dividing by zero: the universe implodes...

I voted "something else".
Two partitions... one for Time Machine, one for periodic clones.

[M A V I C]

A mirrored raid (RAID1) only protects against hardware failure. If that happens, then you're going to lose both partitions.

I would do one partition. If you want to use CCC, use images. But I don't use Time Machine and it seems like that would need its own partition.

[kj4btkljv]

Just be aware that Time Machine is a hog! It wants every available piece of your backup hard drive.

I have never actually combined data (Time Machine backups, CCC backup, other misc data) on an external hard drive, but maybe TM is generous enough to leave that other data well enough alone.

Jeff

[MikeF]

I think there is something wrong with naming something that you want to be used to save yourself as the "Titanic"...

[olnacl]

Why would you trust a single drive for 2 different types of backup? I'd suggest using the large drive for TM backup and get another equal to or somewhat larger than the used portion of your computer HDD for incremental CCC or SD backups.

[martin]

I believe a Time Machine folder and a bootable, updateable clone managed by SuperDuper can exist on the same partition is possible. Two backups, if you will, on one volume.

SuperDuper seems to know a drive is a Time Machine drive *only when* specifically designated as a TM backup drive from within TM preferences.

Normally, Time Machine seems to keep itself to it's folder, Backups.backupdb. In the bowels of the documentation for SuperDuper, it notes that SuperDuper is smart enough not to erase a Time Machine backup; however, it is my experience that my Mac looses awareness of which drive is designated a Time Machine drive. SuperDuper does, in this case, erase my TM backup. If the designated TM drive is selected in TM preferences (and the icon on the desktop representing this drive changes to the blue-green Time Machine icon), SuperDuper clones *along side* the backup folder.

For instance, I usually use a USB external drive for my Time Machine backup, keeping the drive unplugged most of the time and backing up purposefully, every few days. (I don't want a backup every hour every day.) When I replug my drive it mounts, but does not mount with the Time Machine icon. That happens only when I specifically set that drive as a backup in Time Machine preferences. If I don't do this Time Machine *will* work as expected, but SuperDuper has no notion that the drive I direct it to is a Time Machine backup and would erase my TM backup, to make a clone.

I think.