How Big Should I Go? - My Book Pro
 

Having read through this forum for an hour or so, I just want to check that I have understood everything before taking the plunge and ordering a 750GB My Book Pro (USB2, FW800).

My primary aim is to maintain a bootable back-up of my MacBook Pro's 160GB internal drive. Posts on this forum suggest that the My Book Pro is fine for booting but I'm wondering if I will also be able to use the remaining space for storing stuff, such as media files, that I don't need to have backed-up?

i.e. does SD need to have sole use of the entire drive or can it restrict the bootable back-up it creates to a single directory (or partition?), leaving the rest of the space on the external drive available for other uses?

I ask because, if SD does need sole use of the drive, I'll buy a smaller one. BTW, how much back-up space would a 160GB laptop require? Am I right to think that back-ups tend to be marginally bigger than their sources?

I might be getting SD mixed up with Time Machine, I think I might have read that Time Machine will require exclusive use of an external HDD.

Any and all advice appreciated.

You'll just partition the drive into a 160GB partition for your internal, and then a 2nd partition, or whatever you want, for your other data. We don't need the whole drive, just a volume/partition.

Note: make sure you use the GUID partition scheme when you partition.

Thanks for the incredibly fast reply!