Yeah, but you'd best be cloning that drive on a regular basis.
Splitting the drive into two partitions makes sense, but that also is
like putting all your eggs in one basket. If the drive fails and I'm
saying a hardware failure, then you've lost all your data including
your most recent backup if you hadn't cloned it in the last whatever
period of time. Trust me, I've lost so much data over the years to
failed backup solutions and the like, I've gotten quite paranoid and
have found ways of protecting the more critical data. That's why I've
begun to advocate the use of secured online storage like you get from
the Mobile Me service offered by Apple. For the money, that 20Gb of
storage space is mighty fine. Just my two cents worth.
Of course it's nice to have that clone so you don't have to rebuild
your box to get back online so cloning is a very good idea. Although I
have to admit that rebuilding on the Mac is pretty painless.
On Sep 18, 2008, at 1:28 AM, Darcy Burnard wrote:
Hi Tiffany. Assuming your hard drive is large enough, I would
suggest splitting it in to at least two partitions. The first of
these would be used for time machine, and the other as a bootable
clone of your drive. You can use a program like carbon copy cloner
to make the bootable clone. Time machine is nice because it
automatically backs up any changes to your drive without you having
to do anything. On the other hand, you can't boot from that backup
if you need to. This is where the clone comes in. In the event
that something goes wrong with your external drive, you can boot
your mac from the clone. This might enable you to fix the internal
drive. But even if you can't, with the clone you can still use your
mac until such time as you can get your internal drive repaired or
replaced.
Darcy
