My daughter is heading off to college and is picking up a new MacBook Pro. Will need an external, portable hard drive for back up. Any suggestions? I have a LaCie at home but the software and directions are practically unreadable. I have seen smaller Firewire HD but I don't remember the maker. Minimum 250GB, preferably 500GB+.

Go here, and check out the selection. These are great, small and reasonably priced. We bought one a few years ago for use with a Mac Laptop.

Regarding your LaCie. You Do Not need to install software of any kind, just plug it into power and your Mac and you are done. Did you purchae a Mac formatted unit? If so then hook it up and you are ready to go. You can reformat a unit formatted for PC easily but it is not required as the Mac can read and write PC formats. You only must have Mac formatting if you are planning to boot from the drive.

Good luck.

I have a LaCie 500GB external, though it's a desktop drive (LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Disk). I've had it for well over a year, and use it primarily for Time Machine backups. It's basically a plug and play, as it comes pre-formatted for Mac. Just plug it in and it will appear on your desktop. I've actually partitioned it with Disk Utility, and use a portion of it as a Boot Disk for Panther.

LaCie has a fair amount of choices for Mobile External Drives, which are smaller. I'd recommend paying the little extra money for Firewire.

Here's a Deal on the LaCie 500GB Rugged Portable Hard Drive. It's probably the one that I'm going to give my daughter this fall when she goes off to college too.

That looks like the same one they used at the Apple Store here in Ann Arbor to reinstall my system.

Can you use super duper and/or carbon copy cloner to backup more than one computer to this using 10.4.11 G3/G4/G5 mix? Would you have to partition first? We are talking 30,60, and maybe 120 GB drives here.

For a different machine running 10.5 I assume you could use TimeMachine, but it would not be logical to do that to the same drive.

If you want the external to accommodate different OS versions, you'll probably need to partition it first. I used Disk Utility on my 500GB External. 400GB is used for and designated for Time Machine backups, running the latest Leopard version. The other 100GB is bootable into Panther. A good quality external will allow a lot of flexibility, but usually needs to be partitioned first.

Each computer would need to backup/clone to a separate partition, but yes as long as the drive has room it could be done to one drive with multiple partitions.

Time Machine on the other hand does NOT require partitions.

quote:

Originally posted by Donna:
Can you use super duper and/or carbon copy cloner to backup more than one computer to this using 10.4.11 G3/G4/G5 mix? Would you have to partition first? We are talking 30,60, and maybe 120 GB drives here.

For a different machine running 10.5 I assume you could use TimeMachine, but it would not be logical to do that to the same drive.